


A Saint in the City

by Rokesmith



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Detective Noir, Gen, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-09-21 15:33:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 53,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9555176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rokesmith/pseuds/Rokesmith
Summary: In a world with no powers and no particle accelerator, private investigator Eddie Thawne tries to stop business getting personal when an ex-girlfriend hires him to follow her straying husband. It’s a job that turns out to be far from simple, and soon Eddie finds himself caught in a web of secrets, betrayal and murder. With the odds stacked against him and no way of knowing who to trust, Eddie must delve into the shadowy past of Central City to solve the mysteries of its present before the price of truth becomes too high to pay.





	1. Down in Jungleland

**Author's Note:**

> As the summary mentions, this is an detective story AU without super-powers. Leaving that aside, most of the relationships are as they are in the show, with a few changes that should become clear as the story progresses. It was written partly because I find Eddie an engaging character who I wish the show had let stick around for longer. The other motivation is a long-lasting admiration for the work of Raymond Chandler, whose style (true to the PI genre) this fic pays homage to. 
> 
> A second American icon this story borrows from is Bruce Springsteen, from whose lyrics I have respectfully plundered the story and chapter titles. His music has had a lot of influence on my understanding of American culture, and inspired how I write about Central City (not only in this story) and Eddie himself. 
> 
> Speaking of Central City, in previous works I've been content to make up the geography as I've gone along (much like the show's writers, I suspect). However, because I believe that a sense of place is incredibly important to a story like this (the city itself forming almost an extra character) this time I've used a real city map as a base to work from, right down to most of the street names (though the neighbourhood names are taken from the comics). See if you can guess which one.
> 
> Lastly, I am, as noted elsewhere, British, but other than the spelling, I've done my best to use the correct language and vernacular in this story. I apologise if I missed anything.

The phone rang at 08:31 on a cold, bright spring morning. I give my office hours as 08:30 to 18:00 and sometimes people call first thing, before they lose their nerve.

When I picked it up, somebody I never expected to hear from again said, “Hey Eddie.”

“Hey,” I said back.

“It’s Iris,” she added needlessly. I wasn’t going to forget her voice. Or anything else about her.

“Hey, Iris,” I said.

She paused, probably trying to work out if she’d accidentally called a head injury ward. “Are you busy?” she asked.

There was something in her tone that made me focus. “No,” I said. “I just opened up.”

“Do you… do you have a case at the moment?”

There it was again. Like she didn’t know whether to be hopeful or afraid of the answer.

“I just finished one,” I said. “Iris, what is it?”

“Could I come over? To your office?”

“Sure,” I said, matching her faked enthusiasm with my own. “Do you need the address?”

“East Hastings, right?”

“Yeah. Take the door next to the UPS.”

“Okay,” she said, and hung up.

I tried to pass the time. I rearranged the magazines on the little circular table in the waiting corner, set the coffee machine going. That passed two minutes, then I had nothing but my memories.

I’d been partnered up with Joe West when I transferred over the bridge from Keystone to CCPD, because his old partner had just retired and they wanted someone experienced to stop me falling down a manhole while I learned the town. Iris was his daughter. She’d drop by the station sometimes to bug him for titbits for the freelance journalism she did. She got a lot of help from the other officers too. Helen of Troy could have come in looking for a prom date and nobody would have given her a second glance. Then, one day, with the kind of disregard for personal safety that causes people to take up skydiving or lion taming, I asked Iris out. She said yes, and we did coffee then drinks then dinner. Her dad figured it out and he didn’t shoot me. Then, just when I was guessing if I could fit all our clothes in one closet, somebody came back into her life and she pulled away. I guess she’d come further with me than she’d been with any other guy, except I wasn’t the guy she wanted to be there with. That position had been filled, and filled long before I even met her.

A month after it ended I got my heart broken again, but this this time by Mark Mardon, who put a bullet into it outside the Wells Fargo on Oak Street. The doctors kept me alive, but thanks to the department’s insurance company, Detective Thawne died on the table. They gave me a choice: either spend the rest of my career in an well upholstered coffin with one of the teams that only left the station to feature in doughnut jokes, or take a settlement and walk. I walked, and spent the money earning a private license, renting an office and buying a website with ‘E. Thawne, Private Investigator’ on the front page. I figured any more than that would be false advertising.

The last time I’d seen Iris was when she’d visited me in the hospital, bringing me a bunch of flowers and a smile that said goodbye. She’d written up my heroic stand for CCPN. She had a column there now. Under the name Iris West-Allen.

Twenty minutes later she knocked twice on my door and came in. I stood up. She was still beautiful. Caramel skin and chocolate hair. Her eyes were the colour of midnight, but I could see the strands of red in them from across the room. Her lips were set and taut. She wore a light leather jacket over a V-necked blouse and angular jeans. A simple pendant hung around her throat. Her hands were clasped together. I tried not to look at the band of gold glimmering on one of them.

“Hey, Eddie,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

I could see her writing the story of Eddie Thawne behind her eyes. I couldn’t afford prime rent, so my building was in one of those strips commercial strips which save suburbanites the trouble of driving all the way downtown. It had been a movie theatre once, the kind of art moderne place that showed the same film for weeks on end before multiplexes gave us schedules so tight you could miss a run by blinking too slowly. The conversion to offices had been done while I was in junior high. Street level was a UPS-Staples double act and I shared the second floor with a web designer who was pretty reasonable about the sounds of shouting and tears which sometimes made it through our dividing wall.

The office itself was either minimalist or bare, depending on who you asked. Iris looked at the magazines in the little reception area, the narrow desk and the slim-line computer monitor resting on the left-hand side, the carefully matched chairs, the inoffensive brown filing cabinets, one for actual paperwork and the other used as storage. Then she looked at me, standing behind the desk. A private detective who she’d come to see instead of her husband, or her father, or any one of the dozen CCPD officers who would have climbed over each other to be her knight in shining armour.  

“Have a seat,” I said.

She sat. I sat. Then I realised I hadn’t offered her any coffee. She refused so I didn’t have to get up again.

“How’s business?”

“Business is good,” I said.

“What was your last job? If… if you don’t mind me asking.”

“No,” I said, wondering if she was still being a journalist or just afraid to come to the point. “It was a divorce case.”

“Oh.” Her eyes flickered.

“Sort of. My client is divorcing her husband and she’s trying to get child support. He isn’t the kids’ biological father, but he raised them. My client thought he was hiding assets so he wouldn’t have to pay so much. She was right. He was renting out a couple of houses he’d bought through a shell company in Starling City. The business address was just a mailbox. I went up there and took some pictures of it. She showed them to him and told him if he didn’t pay what he owed, she’d show them to her lawyers and ask for double.”

Iris smiled, quick, like a flash of light. Then it was gone.

“Iris, you didn’t come here to ask me about my job. What’s wrong?”

She looked at the floor. She looked at my desk. She looked out of the window. She looked at her hands.

She said, “Barry’s cheating on me.”

That nearly knocked me out of the chair. “You think –”

“I don’t think,” she said. “I know. Something’s wrong. I can feel it.” And it all came out in a rush. “He barely comes home anymore. He says he’s been doing all these late shifts at the precinct clearing a backlog of cases, but my dad doesn’t know anything about it. I’ve called sometimes and if he picks up, I’ve heard people talking in the background. But he works alone. I tried to surprise him with dinner in the lab last week but he wasn’t there. He gets calls and he’ll only answer them when he’s in another room. He’s been having trouble sleeping, like he’s feeling guilty about something.”

I made an effort to play angels’ advocate, just like I would with any other customer. “Iris, there are a lot of reasons why someone’s behaviour can change like that. Why do you think Barry’s being unfaithful?”

She took a moment to breathe. She still wasn’t looking at me. “Sometimes, when he comes back late, his shirts smell of perfume. Expensive perfume. Once, his cell rang while he was in the shower. I don’t know why, but I answered it. It was a woman’s voice. I didn’t recognise it. She asked for Barry and I said he was in the shower. I asked who she was and if I could take a message, but she said she’d call back and hung up. I told Barry, he said it was just something from work, but I know he was lying. I’ve tried asking him and he just won’t tell me. I have to know, Eddie. I have to.”

It took a lot to keep me in my seat, instead of wrapping my arms around her. It took a lot not to drive straight to CCPD and beat Barry Allen to death in the middle of the bullpen. If I told them about the tears in Iris’ eyes, no cop there would touch me.

“This call, do you remember the name?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

Despite her best efforts, a tear slipped out. Her look burned, daring me to acknowledge it. I didn’t. She was tearing a tissue to pieces in her lap.

I put my professional mask back on. It didn’t fit so easy this time. 

“Okay, Iris, if you want to do this, I’m going to have to ask you some questions. You might not like some of them, but the more honest you are, the easier it will be for me to find out what’s going on.”

She dabbed her eyes with the remains of the tissue. There wasn’t a smudge in her makeup. She’d had practice at this.

“I’m ready,” she said.

I opened a new file on the computer and looked at her over the keyboard. “What’s Barry’s full name?”

“Bartholomew Henry Allen.”

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Where do you live?”

“In Danville. On Hudson Street.”

“Does he still work at the precinct lab?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Umm… nine months last week.”

I typed, ignoring the knife twisting in my gut.

“Does he wear a wedding ring?”

“No. He’d have to take it off in the lab. We joked he’d just lose it.”

“When did you first notice these changes in Barry’s behaviour?”

“I don’t know, exactly. But the first time that was really weird was when he was late to my dad’s Christmas party. He’s… he’s always late but this time was different. He didn’t get there for three hours and he barely talked to anybody.”

“You said you didn’t recognise the woman who called him. Does he have many female friends? Or old girlfriends?”

She had to think about that one. “Barry… doesn’t have that many close friends. Umm… there’s my dad’s new partner, Patty Spivot. Did you know her? He only has two ex-girlfriends that I know about. Fiona from college, but I think she moved out of state. And Felicity. She works in cyber-security in Starling City. They still see each other sometimes, but just as friends. She’s nice.”

“Felicity…”

“Smoak.”

“Has he mentioned any new friends you don’t know? Male or female?”

“Not that I remember.”

“What about your friends? Have you noticed any of them acting differently?”

She stiffened up again. Nobody liked that question. “Seriously?”

“It can happen,” I said.

“No. No, I haven’t noticed anything like that.”

I checked the notes, made sure I hadn’t missed anything. “Alright, Iris. If I do this, what do you want?”

“Proof,” she said. “Something I can show him so he can’t lie or back out or say it’s nothing.”

“And then?”

She looked at her hands. Twisted her wedding ring. “I don’t know,” she said.

I had to ask, one last time. “Iris, are you sure?”

“Eddie… if I have to, I want to hear it from a friend.”

I hoped I hadn’t let the sting show. If she wanted a private investigator, that’s what I’d give her.

“If you want proof, I’ll have to follow Barry until I get it. I can GPS his car, and I can tail him. I’ll keep a record and take photographs. The surveillance will cost you four hundred dollars a day with expenses on top. I’ll need two days’ in advance.”

“Eight hundred dollars,” she said. “Right.”

She took a cheque book out of her bag, wrote one out. I printed an invoice, a receipt and a contract, and signed it. She added her full name without a pause. Then, before I had to ask, she gave me her home address, her and Barry’s cell numbers, her work address at CCPN and the license plates of her little Mercedes and his Honda. Journalists know what you need to tail someone too.

“What about his friends? Anywhere he’d go for fun?”

She had to think about that one. It was a short list. Almost as short as mine would have been. Her dad. A bar and grill on West Pender Street that the CSIs used for their nights out. A multiplex on 17th Avenue. Jitters coffee shop on Nelson. 

“Is that all?”

“That’s all,” Iris said.

“So is there anything else you want to tell me? That you think might help?”

“No, I don’t think so. Do you need anything else? I’m sorry, I have to get to work.”

“I’ll call you soon,” I said, like a doctor or a cab driver.

Iris nodded. “Text me. Ask about meeting for coffee. Barry won’t think that’s weird.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“He trusts me,” she said.

I didn’t say anything. She took a card and slipped it into the depths of her purse. Then she got up.

“Good luck, Eddie. And… thank you.”

We swapped goodbyes and she walked out. She left her perfume behind, and nothing else. After a while, I had to get up and open the window, or I wasn’t going to think about the job.

While we were dating, Iris told me enough about Barry Allen to feel like we were at least acquaintances. The only negative adjectives she used described his timekeeping. I wondered what could possess a guy like that to play around on a wife he’d had for less than a year. Maybe he figured he owed it to his youth. Maybe he’d been made an offer he couldn’t refuse. Maybe when he finally got Iris down off her pedestal, he found she wasn’t the woman he’d been imagining.

Maybe I really, really didn’t want to know.


	2. Maybe, Baby, the Gypsy Lied

The Central City police are based in a pale grey building on Cambie Street. Most people use the art-deco sign to find the main entrance, but there are actually three ways in, not counting the parking garage. The problem is that there are eight ways out. That makes it difficult to watch, which is how the cops like it. Car salesmen don’t have to go to work worrying there might be a paroled bank robber with a Beretta and a grudge watching them from across the street.  

It’s that sort of paranoia that makes cops difficult people to follow. Even if they weren’t trained observers, everybody who works in the precinct has it hammered into them from day one to watch out for careful strangers, repeated license plates or anything odd that a normal person in a normal office could happily dismiss.

I guess I had an advantage there. The cops would see me, but they knew me. I’d been to the station four times in the last three months. If anybody asked, I’d tell them that a teenager girl I’d been tracking over Thanksgiving had vanished again. If you’re trying to lie to a cop, at least prepare in advance.

There was a coffee shop on the corner with a wide glass front that kept out the cold and let me see down to all the entrances and half the exits. It was full of metal tables and vacuum-formed plastic chairs, shaped to keep people comfortable as they lingered over their pulverised Arabica beans. That made it a great spot for surveillance, so after the lunch rush I planted myself by the window and pretended that wasn’t what I was doing. I had a text document open to cover the programs I actually used. Being an independent investigator is just like any other kind of self-employment: you’ve got to do all your own paperwork.

A college-aged waitress with streaks of red in her blonde hair smiled an on-shift smile as she brought me a sandwich. “Whatcha working on?” she asked.

“I’m a writer,” I said.

The smile got a little tense. “You writing the great American novel?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Non-fiction. I’m in town working on a history of Keystone’s car industry.”

She brightened up. “Okay. You have family over there?”

“Not anymore,” I said.

One day I was going to have to think of a title for the imaginary book I sometimes used as a cover. I knew enough about the decline and fall of Keystone’s industries to fake it. That was where my dad had spent his entire career, rising just high enough to be the guy the workers blamed when it all went to hell.

I guess I should have picked another subject for a disguise, but the only other thing I knew enough about was being a cop.

At least that had taught me what to expect from Barry Allen. CSIs work shifts, switching between the labs and crime scenes. Allen had enough seniority to spend two thirds of his time on what was almost a nine to five but usually stretched out to something more like my office hours, assuming there wasn’t a major traffic collision or a murder somewhere in the city.

Neither of those things happened. The station spent the afternoon looking like almost any office block in the city. People went in. People went out. The civilians always looked a little relieved; everybody going into a station is afraid the cops will see the thing they’re feeling guilty about and won’t let them leave. And everybody feels guilty about something. 

I switched coffee shops around the shift change. The second place was trying for a higher class of clientele, with more sophisticated tables and chairs in pale woods instead of plastics. They still had some sandwiches left, so I got a tuna melt and tried not to get distracted by my accountancy spreadsheets.

Allen didn’t come out when his shift should have ended. Maybe he wanted to miss the traffic. Maybe he was trying to cover the times he’d been somewhere else. Maybe he was playing _Angry Birds_ with the door shut, so that his colleagues would back his alibi. Maybe he was justifying it as a non-physical affair, and they were just having long talks on the phone or Skype. Maybe she was at the station too. Maybe he was working late with no ulterior motives at all.

I’d seen them all before, and I doubted the last one. One of the great lies the male ego tells us is that we can cheat on our partners without them noticing. But they will notice something, they always do. They may ignore it, they may try to justify it, they may simply not care. Or we may come home one day to find our clothes in a bonfire on the lawn.  

I spotted Allen’s car leaving the precinct just after eight. I had just enough light and luck to catch up with him as he drove south. I didn’t have to worry about losing him. He drove like my aunt.

He didn’t stop for anything but traffic lights on his way back to Danvile. No two buildings on Hudson Street were the same, so his house was easy to find when I looped back. It was a pink-stoned cube with extruded windows to give it texture; three up and two down. It had a solid portico around the heavy wooden front door, lit by a hanging electric lantern. There were similar lanterns running along the low stone wall which separated the sidewalk from a small front yard with clear paths laid out around neat semicircles of grass. When I got closer I realised the yard extended around both sides of the house towards the back, but the gaps were obscured by trees.

Two of the house’s rooms were lit. One downstairs, where I figured Allen was getting his dinner. The other was upstairs. From the layout of the house I guessed it had two bedrooms, one of them being used as a home office until the time came to repurpose it for reasons that I added to my list of things I didn’t want to think about.

I didn’t outstay my welcome. There was no way for me to tell if Allen had been up to no good that evening. I checked hood of the Honda to make sure I had the one that was still warm and then slipped a little tracker into the rear wheel-arch. Iris had given me permission even if it wasn’t exactly her car. Whether that made it legal or not depended on who you asked. Another of those moral quandaries that private investigators only worry about if they get caught.

I got back in my car and went home.

* * *

Iris was the first one out of the house the next morning. She walked to her car with her eyes on her cell phone and took a minute before she started it up. Just enough time to finish an email. If she looked up long enough to see me parked three houses away, she gave no sign.

Allen was twenty minutes later. He hadn’t changed much from the photographs I’d seen at the West’s. Still looking young enough to be carded at a bar. Still long and narrow enough to be the result of an accident with an industrial deep draw. Still with a teenager’s uncertainty of where his limbs began and ended.

He came through the door at a run. There was half a bagel in his mouth. He’d gotten to the kerb before he remembered to go back and lock up. Then he jumped into the Honda and did a messy racing start around the corner. The marker on my GPS had followed him to the next junction before I got going as well.

I hadn’t expected him to stop anywhere on the way in. He didn’t, but you’ve always got to eliminate the impossible. He drove straight to the station, down the exact same route he’d taken home the day before. I kept him in sight most of the way, and when I couldn’t, the GPS covered me. No pauses longer than a stop light and nothing but the traffic to slow him down. He arrived just in time to be five minutes late.

After that it was back to my coffee tasting. This time I spent the morning in the more expensive place. Shifting staff meant I didn’t see anyone who remembered me from the day before. This time my book was a history of the Central City Police. I asked a waitress if she got many officers in there. She hadn’t. Then I asked her about the CSIs. Thanks to CBS, everybody knows about them. They didn’t come in either.

I tried the same questions in the afternoon. Then I took a chance and asked about a friend on the force, a talkative officer called Patty and whether she’d ever come in with the tall CSI she was dating. Nobody had seen either of them.

Being a cop teaches you never to assume that people will be smart. But at least Allen wasn’t dumb enough to be seeing another woman across the street from everybody he worked with. And his father-in-law.

He was also smart enough not to use his own car when he wanted to sneak around. Fifteen minutes after his shift ended he came out of the station’s side entrance on foot. He headed around the corner as I made for my car. I stopped before the turning and watched him hail a cab. The first one didn’t stop.

The second one did. With Allen aboard, it zigzagged south and then took the quickest and most visible route east, straight down Central Avenue into New Brighton. Everything there was new concrete and the buildings came by the block. The only way to tell them apart was the unique and incomprehensible five-foot high sculptures they all seemed to have in front of the main entrance. Maybe that was how the cab drivers navigated.

Allen got out opposite a blue-grey oblong that called itself Halifax Towers. While he paid the fair, I pulled up and grabbed my DSLR from the back seat. There was just enough light left to shoot through the long-lens without losing quality.

I shot Allen by the cab and crossing the road. It took me a few photos to realise that he’d changed his clothes. He’d replaced his red sweater with a blazer and put on a nicer shirt than he’d worn in the lab. When he turned to look both ways I saw he hadn’t added a tie.

I got some more pictures of him hitting one of the buzzers, speaking to the intercom and then heading inside. I rearranged my parking situation as fast as I could and then risked a run across the road to the building’s door. I had a pretty good idea which buzzer I’d seen him use. The buttons only had numbers above them, but mail slots in the opposite wall came with names. I wrote down the ones which matched the intercom row that Allen had used. I didn’t recognise any of them, but thought Iris might.

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. He could be inside for a few minutes or a couple of hours. It might be totally innocent. It would be easy to text Iris and ask if he’d mentioned any plans for the night, but I didn’t. She’d hired a private detective. We’re supposed to give evidence, not a commentary.

I’d waited less than ten minutes when I saw Allen come out again. He wasn’t alone. There was a woman with him, and I wanted to look over the camera to make sure of what I was seeing.

Starting from the top, she had chestnut hair in waves down to her shoulders. Her skin was the sort of pale they give fairy-tale princesses. Her eyes were amber and her lips were full and red. Her midnight-blue dress didn’t get close to her smooth knees and her knife-sharp heels cut away most of the height difference between her and Allen.

My hands on the camera kept shooting automatically through the admiration, and through the moments that followed when my blood turned to ice at the thought of telling Iris.

Allen trailed after the woman and folded himself inside a green European compact. She drove. Throwing the car off the kerb and into the opposite lane in those heels must have taken years of practice. I nearly missed them in the fading light but the car’s shape gave me a marker.

She made it easier, getting back on Central under the street lights. Then she started making quick, slippery lane changes whenever there was a chance to merge. It took me a few of them before I realised she wasn’t being careless. She kept the car perfectly in the lane the rest of the time and there was always exactly the amount of space she needed when she arrived in the gap. I managed to stay with them without doing anything that would give me away. People who want to shake tails try harder. I figured this was just how she normally drove, and I couldn’t say I envied Allen his place in the passenger seat. 

The traffic got heavier and the NASCAR trials dropped off. By now I’d made a good guess where they were heading, and I was right. She took the turning at Granville Street and I followed them north into Petersburg. We left the boutique shops and trendy markets behind and reached the long strip of bars, clubs and restaurants. Every bock the fronts got better and the prices got higher.

If they’d done this on a weekend, there wouldn’t have been any parking for miles, but the compact turned off Granville and found a spot in between the low brick blocks on West 11th Avenue. I gave it another half-block and stopped as well. Then I crossed the street and ducked into the shadows of a shared driveway to write down the car’s make, model and plates. Allen and the woman were already heading back towards Granville. Her snapping steps easily kept up with his long, loping strides.

They hadn’t come so far north that a date would cost more than one limb, but they were close. They stopped outside one of the few white stone buildings still left in this part of town. Allen checked something on his cell and then a bus rolled in front of them and they disappeared.

I crossed over after them. From that side of the street it was easy to see where they’d gone. The place’s entrance was below street-level, down a narrow flight of metal steps. The black letters on the awning above the varnished wooden door called it the Nemean Club.

I backed off, gave it five minutes to watch the door and then headed down the steps and went inside.

The low ceiling didn’t stop the well-polished room feeling big and open. There were small steel tables around three of the walls, each with stools around their free sides. The bar took up the final wall, smooth black stone with a collection of expensive bottles arranged in front of a big, old fashioned mirror.  There was a lounge area in the centre of the room, a line of back-to-back couches and low tables between the bar and the walls.

Allen and his lady friend had picked one of these. He had his back to the door, which wasn’t so smart. I picked a high table in the corner that would let me watch them and the rest of the bar, and checked the menu. Food and cocktails, but the rates weren’t so bad. Maybe that was why there were four other occupied tables this early on an off night. The music might have appealed to somebody. Over the waves of conversation, the house stereo played a jazz cover of a Taylor Swift song. The contrast made my head hurt.

I looked at Allen over the menu. He was hunching, hands in his lap moving as he talked. The woman was sitting straight and silent opposite him. She looked up for a minute and caught my eye. I gave her the best smile I could manage on short notice and got nothing back. Her eyes went back to Allen. That might have hurt if it hadn’t been exactly what I was trying for. Just another guy checking out a hot girl at a bar. Ignore me and forget about it.

I went to the bar. The guy behind it had his hair and beard swept and styled, and wore a suit about two hundred dollars too expensive for his job. I asked him for a Manhattan and was surprised to see him mix it himself. He didn’t show off, but I got the feeling he could if he thought it would get him a tip. He watched me the whole time, and when I sipped the drink he looked over my shoulder at the door like he bracing for Elliot Ness to kick it open.

I went back to my table with the promise of potato skins to follow, feeling like I’d been made.

The further down the cocktail list you went, the more exotic things got. I pulled out my cell phone like I was trying to Google the five different kinds of gin they offered and angled the camera at the low tables. All I could get was the back of Allen’s head, but the woman was clear on the screen. She was talking now. Slowly, patiently like she was explaining something she didn’t expect him to understand without a few repetitions. Maybe she was a soccer fan.

Allen got up. He didn’t look towards me but the profile was clear enough. I tried not to think about playing the video for a divorce lawyer as I filmed him on the way to the bar. He pulled up a stool and started talking to the barman. I got the feeling they were trying not to be overheard. I wasn’t watching a debate about vermouth.

I kept one eye on the table. The woman hadn’t looked up. She was reading something on her own cell. It took me a minute, but I got a look at her fingers. They were all bare.

The talk at the bar ended as another group of potential customers came in. Allen went back to his table. There was a sharp question and a soft answer. He handed over a daiquiri I guessed was virgin and took a sip of something that was mostly ice.

I took a gulp of my own drink. A blonde waitress I could have carried home in my pocket slipped my potato skins on the table. She looked up at me through her bangs and her eyes made promises we both knew she wouldn’t keep. She only stayed long enough for a tip.

I put my cell down, ate a skin and swirled the Manhattan. I hardly heard the step. Perfume wrapped around me like silk. There was a woman standing next to me. She had iceberg-pale eyes. Her hair was loose around her slender neck, curling from smoky quartz to gold. Her clothes were black on black. A tight top full of hints and pants that made me wonder how she managed to glide like that.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

Her voice was shy. Hesitant. But her smile was an invitation. There were still five or six empty tables she could have picked. She’d passed at least two on her way over.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m waiting for somebody.”

“Oh. A date?”

“A friend.”

“Your friend like this place?” She asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

She’d driven me right into that cliché. “You come here often?”

“When I can.” She saluted with her drink. “They do a great gimlet. I’m Lisa.”

“Eddie.” I grabbed at a lie. “We just picked it off a Google search. It’s close to Bette’s hotel.”

Lisa’s mouth twitched. “She came all this way to see you. Are you sure it’s not a date?”

“Sorry to disappoint. She’s in town for a couple of days before her next deployment. We were in high school before she joined the army.”

I broke eye-contact and concentration to look past her. Allen was back at the bar again.

“And what did you do, Eddie? After high school?”

“Went to college,” I said. “Became an actuary.”

My other fall-back. Nobody ever asks, and if they do, they’ll never know if you’re telling the truth. Even Lisa didn’t want to press in case I wasn’t lying. That gave me another minute to look at Allen. He was nearly laying on the bar to keep his conversation private. His date literally watched his back.

Lisa didn’t turn to see what I was looking at. It was enough that it wasn’t her.  

“I’m sorry. I guess I’m bothering you.”

There was no good answer to that question. I picked a worse one.

“Sorry. Just had a bad breakup. I guess… you kinda remind me of her.”

Lisa’s smile went away. “Do I?” It came back with a razor edge. “If your ex is sitting behind me in a blue dress, then you should find somewhere else to drink. Friendly warning.”

She glided away across the room. She passed the woman she thought I might be stalking, but didn’t say a word. She settled at the bar next to Allen. The bartender dropped him as soon as she waved her empty glass.

Allen went back to his table, head down. Some more words went back and forth. She said something, giving an order. He nodded, obeying it. Then she picked up her bag and headed for the bathrooms.

Their drinks were only half done, but instinct told me that was all for this place. I didn’t give Allen the chance to turn around and puzzle out if he recognised me. I went straight for the door like I was taking Lisa’s hint and made for my car.

I’d guessed right. Ten minutes later the woman’s Fiat went passed me like it was at Daytona. This time it was a fight to keep up. On the spot-lit roads she really put my defensive driving courses to the test, hitting the speed limit and staying there, never running a single light. I didn’t worry about hanging close. All she’d see of my car were the lights in her mirror.

If I hadn’t needed all my concentration on the road, I’d have seen the obvious earlier, but it took me till we were most of the way back to New Brighton before I caught on. She was headed straight back to her place. That could have meant a lot of things, but it was a weeknight and they both had work tomorrow. I’d rolled the dice and there was nothing to do but keep with the car until she pulled into the open lot behind her building. She got out, flashed the alarm lights and must have had her fob ready because she went into the block without breaking stride. Alone.

I watched the Fiat for a few minutes, waiting for it to move. It didn’t, so I went to make sure I knew how stupid I’d been. There was no trace of Allen in the car. That’s why he hadn’t gotten out. He’d never gotten in.

* * *

I went home. At the time, that meant two rooms on Commercial Drive. One day they’d knock the place down and turn it into luxury apartments, but until that day came it was mine.

There was a Chinese place a block away that was always glad to see me. I put the takeout chicken chow mein on a plate and ate it with a fork, so I could pretend I’d made it myself. I put the tv on and found the replay of the day’s Combines game. I was hoping they’d choke to give me something to get good and mad about, but they let me down there too.

My mind wasn’t on the game. It was on the door. I kept thinking of Iris walking in and begging me to comfort her. She didn’t even know where I lived anymore.  

I killed the thoughts with half a bottle of Jim Bean and went to bed. I figured I’d get up early and take out my conflict of interest on a heavy bag or two.

I didn’t get the chance. My cell rang at half past six the next morning. I didn’t get my eyes open far enough to look at the number before I answered.

“Yeah?”

“Eddie?”

Her voice was a bucket of ice water. The pain in it knocked my headache out of the park.

“Iris? What’s wrong?”

“Eddie, it’s Barry. He’s… he’s been arrested. They think he killed Harrison Wells.”


	3. Point Blank

I hadn’t gotten from home to the station so quickly when I worked there. The front desk didn’t even check if I really had an appointment, they just waved me up. Maybe they figured nobody would be doing this if they didn’t have to.

I shared the elevator with a traffic cop coming off his patrol. He gave me a searching look, but since I didn’t have wheels or a licence plate, he’d forgotten about me before the doors even closed. When they opened again, he went to the left and I spent a minute standing under the giant art-deco sculpture that gave the cops on the desks something to look at on slow mornings. The gods of the old world looked back at the guardians of the new one. Truth, liberty and justice. On a good day you might get two out of three.

The bullpen was the calm after the storm. There were still people talking and moving about, but it was so careful and so quiet that it seemed to barely happen at all. Nobody looked up when I came in. I gazed out over a dry pond of heads as they all tried to seem like they were busy.

Somebody grabbed my arm and spun me around. “Eddie, what are you doing here?”

Detective Patty Spivot was wearing a funeral-sombre grey blouse and pants. Her wheat-coloured hair was pulled back into a beat officer’s ponytail. Another sign of interesting times I pretended not to notice.

“Hey Patty. Is Joe around?”

Her grip didn’t let up. “Eddie, this is a really, really bad time to ask for a favour.”

Usually, Patty was my go-to woman for help at the precinct. A senior detective like Joe West couldn’t be seen passing tips to private investigators, but nobody batted an eyelid if his junior partner happened to let too much slip while telling me how little she could help.

I looked past her like I was hearing the quiet for the first time. “What’s going on?”

“Harrison Wells is dead,” she said.

As there probably wasn’t anybody in the city who didn’t know by now, I said, “Yeah, it was on the radio. But I figured it was a car accident or something.”

That’s all the radio had given me. Harrison Wells, founder of STAR Labs, the guy some people called ‘the man who saved Central City’ died last night. We’ll have more after these messages. 

She let go of me, just so she could cross her arms. “It wasn’t. He was in his office. He’d been shot.”

“Thawne!”

The voice cracked across the room. The desk watch looked up long enough to see the storm front on the face of Captain David Singh and then the heads went straight down again. All the righteous fury and frustration of an entire police precinct crammed into one five and a half foot administrator. Singh crossed the bullpen and looked at me like I’d just become his personal speed bag.

“Captain,” Patty exclaimed. “I was just telling Eddie… nothing. Just why he should leave.”

“Why’s he here?” Singh asked.

“Guy from Midway skipped out, captain,” I said. “His wife thinks he might have come here.”

That was all the story I needed. “Okay,” Singh said. “Go ask Detective West. He’s in his office. Detective Spivot, the press conference is in twenty minutes. Make sure Mr Thawne is gone by then.”

“Yes, captain.”

I let Patty stay in front of me, like I didn’t know the way to the detective bureau. Joe’s office door was shut. None of the others were. I waited for somebody to hand me a chair and a bullwhip. Nobody did, so I went in. Patty closed the door behind me.

If you asked someone to sit down and describe their idea of the perfect cop, Joe West would come pretty close. He was old enough to be protective, but still young enough to run down the guy who stole your cell phone. Smart enough to catch up to the city’s best bank robbers and big enough to put them down hard when he did. I’d listened to him intimidate a carjacker out of his vehicle and away from a shotgun, and I’d seen him talk a knife out of the hand of a scared kid. When he laughed you’d hear it for miles, and his smile could have brought Keystone back to life.  

He wasn’t smiling now. He was watching his desk like he expected it to throw a punch. He didn’t look up till I was in front of it. Then he stared at me like a school principle reading a report card full of Ds.

“Eddie.”

I only had enough time for honesty. “Hey, Joe. Iris called me.”

“Iris called you?”

“Yeah. It’s a long story. She said… Barry’s been arrested. What happened?”

Joe looked at me. I was weighed, measured and not found wanting. Or maybe he was that desperate.

“Not arrested. Not yet. He’s a material witness.”

“Why?”

He took a minute to answer. We both knew the formula. Somebody gets taken into custody as a material witness if the cops think they’ve got evidence relevant to an investigation and won’t show up for a subpoena. Because they’ve made a run for the border or something.

“If I tell you,” Joe said, “you can’t tell Iris.”

A bad bargain, but the best I was going to get. She’d understand. “Okay.”

Joe gave me the full brief, like I still had a badge on my hip. “The call came in at ten twenty-eight. Jesse Wells, the vic’s daughter. She was at the college library. They close at ten so she walked around to STAR Labs to ask her dad to drive her home. He worked late a lot.”

“And she found him? Jesus.”

“Yeah. She’s a tough kid. Real tough. Called us. Called an ambulance. EMTs got there first and confirmed DOA. One shot, close range. No weapon at the scene.”

“How’d they tie in Barry Allen?”

“Jesse Wells said she saw him as she arrived at the labs. He was coming out. She said he stopped by the river and looked like he dropped or threw something in. She’s not sure, but they’ve probably got divers down there already.”

I tried to find a hole in the story, like he’d probably done. “How did she even know who Barry was?”

“She gave us his name and a description. He spent some time at STAR Labs last fall, trying to figure if some of their fancy new tech had any forensic applications. I don’t know. But he met Doctor Wells. He wouldn’t shut up about for weeks. I guess he must’ve met Jesse too.”

So Barry Allen had been identified at the scene. He knew STAR Labs. He knew the victim. If I’d still worn that badge, I’d have him in an interview room as well.

That gave me the next important question. “Who’s got the case?”

“IA,” Joe said, like you’d speak of the devil.

“Keystone?”

CCPD wasn’t big enough to need its own Internal Affairs department, so they shared one across the bridge. That way the guys who worked there couldn’t make friends in either city.

“Yeah. Some guy called Zolomon. Hunter Zolomon. You know him?”

“Just the name,” I said. “He used to be a Fed.”

Joe gave me another long look. Probably wondering what good I was if that’s all I could bring to the table from my old department. I’d left Keystone for a couple of reasons, but none of them got me attention from Internal Affairs.

I tried to be useful. “Anything else I can’t tell Iris?”

“No. Something you can tell her. Barry’s been here an hour. Zolomon’s letting him stew, but the boy hasn’t called a lawyer yet. So you make sure Iris has one here before Zolomon’s done waiting.”

“Right,” I said.

I looked at the door and then at my watch. If I didn’t ask now, I wasn’t going to get another chance.

“Joe, I need a favour. I need you to run a plate for me.”

He nearly laughed. He nearly hit me. He managed not to do either.

“Please, Joe. I don’t need an address. Just the name on the licence.”

“Tell me this has nothing to do with my son-in-law.” It was an order.

“This has nothing to do with your son-in-law,” I repeated.

He waited a minute, so it’d look like he was deciding. I could see he wasn’t. Joe West was a good cop, but every man has a price. Joe’s was his family.

“Make it fast, Eddie.”

I gave him the digits. He took out some of his anger on the database.

“Doctor Caitlin Snow,” he said. He even spelled it for me.

“Thanks, Joe.”

The door tapped. Patty gave it five seconds and then came in. Nobody would be able to say she’d heard anything.

“I’m sorry, Joe. Eddie, your time’s up.”

“That’s okay,” Joe said, locking himself down again. “We’re done.”

“I’ll see you round, Joe.”

He didn’t look up to say goodbye. Outside, he was still. Inside, the cop and the father were fighting to the death.

Patty made sure I got to the elevator. She didn’t take her eyes off me till the doors were closed. Downstairs was a crowd of journalists waiting for Captain Singh to make a statement. He’d tell them nothing and they knew it, but that was how you played the game.

None of them noticed me go past. I got in my car and headed for Danville.  

* * *

I leaned hard on the bell, but there was no answer. I was just about to call inside when the door opened. Linda Park had cut her warm brown hair since I’d seen her last. Now it came to a hard stop above her collar. She was a mistress of just-thrown-together charm, today in a white blouse, patterned slacks and dreamcatcher earrings. She was also the CCPN sports reporter, a woman in a boy’s world. Everybody got a smile from her, but the one she handed me was pretty small.

“Hey Eddie. Iris said you were coming over. Come in.”

She didn’t approve of me being there, whether or not she knew the reason for it. She’d been giving Iris some space, camping out on the couch. An open laptop and a notebook of scrawls waited in front of a paused recording of a Stars game from last year on the widescreen tv. It looked like someone about to make or miss a catch. If the crowd were up, I wasn’t surprised she hadn’t heard the door.

The tv was flanked by an honour guard of favourite movies. Two shelves of books above it; one his, one hers. There was a forensics book on the coffee table, next to a heavy, worn copy of _Bonfire of the Vanities_. Iris’ tenth trip to New York in the eighties, unless she’d lost count.

Linda walked me into the kitchen. It was big enough to pull double duty as a dining room. There was a steamer, a rice cooker and a blender on the counters around the oven. A coffee maker you’d need a PhD to operate. Enough plates, bowls and glasses on the shelves to feed the CCPN newsroom. None of them matched, and they weren’t more than a year old. Wedding presents.

Iris was at the table, hiding behind a vase of wilting flowers. She had her laptop open. I could tell without looking that she had a text file ready and the page was blank. Her husband was part of the biggest story in town and she wouldn’t be able to find a sentence for that or anything else for a long time.

“Eddie’s here,” Linda said, because one of us had to say something. “Just call if you need me.”

She didn’t say anything to me, but I caught the message in her eyes. She could call in favours from a lot of offensive guards and even more enforcers. Mess Iris around and I’d end up under and end zone somewhere with only Jimmy Hoffa for company.

The door closed behind her and the game restarted. The catch was good.

I took a long look out the window. Their backyard was a rectangle of unruly grass. Around the edge, two rows of spring flowers were starting to wave for attention. It was strange; I couldn’t imagine either of them wrist deep in the soil or looking happy at scrubbing the dirt out from under their nails the way my mom used to.

The time I’d given myself ran out. I walked up to the table and slowly pushed down the computer screen. The laptop snapped closed with a tiny gunshot. Iris looked up. Good. If she wanted to put another round in me, she’d have to do it between the eyes.

“Did you see Barry?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No. Joe says they’ve got him as a material witness. And we both know that they can use that to keep him locked up for months if they want to.”

Iris nodded slowly. She knew the tricks as well as I did.

“So you want to tell me what this is about?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

I let a little of my temper out. “Not this, Iris. Yesterday. Barry isn’t cheating on you and you know it.”

There were flames in her eyes. I ignored them. Maybe if I got her mad enough she’d answer me.

“Come on, Iris. The perfume on his shirts? The call from some woman while he’s in the shower whose name and number you _don’t remember_? Did you get that out of a movie or cheap thriller?” I took a breath, waiting for her to speak, but getting nothing. “You learn a lot about adulterers doing this job. People having affairs don’t half-ass it, especially their first time. They either try real hard or they don’t try at all. Barry’s a CSI, I think he’d realise it was a bad idea to let his girlfriend spray Chanel on his clothes.” Space for another breath. “Now I’m gonna ask you once, Iris. Why?”

The flames in her eyes had gone out. The tears had seen to that. I wanted more than anything to look away.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. Barry’s been acting so strange lately. The weird hours, the time out of the lab, the lies about where he’s been, that’s all real. I was scared.”

“So you come see me. Big, dumb, _jealous_ Eddie, and you figure I’ll follow Barry through the gates of hell for a chance to prove he doesn’t deserve you.”

Her head gave a sharp shake. “I was afraid you’d tell me it was nothing. That I was over-reacting. But I had to know.”

If she’d been looking at me like that, I wouldn’t have. Iris West didn’t freak out for just anybody. And Barry Allen was the luckiest man in the world that she’d do it for him.

I didn’t let go of the hurt yet. I still needed it for something.

“Who’s Doctor Caitlin Snow?”

This time the shake was confusion. “Who?”

“Iris…”

“I swear, I don’t know who that is.”

“You’ve never heard Barry mention her?”

“No.”

I slipped out my cell phone and flicked it to one of the pictures I’d taken the night before. Iris gave the image a stare so hard the real Doctor Snow could probably feel it.

“Is that her? Who is she?”

“She’s the woman Barry was with last night. And if she’s his girlfriend I’ll buy a hat and eat it.”

“You’re sure?”

I pretended I hadn’t heard the new tremor in her voice. “I’m sure. Check the photos. No hand-holding, no kissing, no touching. Either she’s really anti-PDA or they’re just friends. In fact, if she’d been wearing a white coat I’d have thought he was her patient.”

“What were they doing?”

“I don’t know, exactly. He took a cab to her apartment and they spent a couple of hours at a bar. Then she went back to her place. I only realised he wasn’t in the car as well when she got back. I guess he went on to STAR Labs.”

She braced herself. “So what now?”

I gave it a minute. There were two answers to that question and I didn’t know which one to pick. So I was going to give her the choice that was no choice at all.

“Now you call a lawyer for Barry. If you don’t know one I’m sure your dad can give you a few names. You call one and you tell them whatever it takes to make them hire me.”

She hadn’t expected that. Her face asked the question her hanging jaw couldn’t manage.

“Internal Affairs are probably already treating to Barry as the prime suspect,” I said. “They’re going to put out an appeal for information. Anybody who knows anything should come forward. As soon as they do that, I’ll be concealing information from an active investigation because I know exactly where Barry was from seven-fifteen to nine-thirty last night. The CCPD can make it really hard for me to make a living in this town if they find out I’m holding out on them.”

She might have figured it out, but she needed to ask for the last piece, just to be sure. “Why would you do that?”

A couple of reasons. Only one I felt like I could say. “Because until you say otherwise, you’re still my client.”

I saw her expression change. The scared wife didn’t have what she needed; the journalist’s questions would have to wait. Joe West’s daughter said, “Okay, Eddie. I’ll find a lawyer.”

“Good. Now I need to know two things you’ve probably already told the cops. First, what time did Barry get home last night?”

“I… I don’t know. Exactly. I went to sleep at eleven. I think I remember him coming to bed but I don’t know what time. What’s the second question?”

“Does Barry own a gun?”

I’d have got the same reaction asking if he owned a lion. “No!” she exclaimed. “I… I do. I keep it in a locked box in the closet. It was still there this morning. The cops asked me for it.”

“Does Barry know how to use it?”

“I’ve never seen him try. He didn’t take the certification.”

That was the best I was going to get. Allen was a CSI. He could probably disassemble every gun in the city from a compact to an assault rifle like he’d been trained at the factories that made them. But treating a gun like a jigsaw puzzle won’t tell you how to shoot a guy with it.

“He wouldn’t do it, Eddie. Barry wouldn’t kill anyone.”

I’d heard that before. From wives, girlfriends, neighbours and parents. It couldn’t be the person they loved who sold drugs, robbed convenience stores, or hit and ran. They didn’t believe it when the cuffs went on and sometimes not even when the gavel came down.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

She let it lie. Changed the question. “What are you going to do?”

“Unless Barry comes up with a really good alibi, they’re not going to let him out for a while. But something tells me he doesn’t have one. And all I can do is tell them where he _wasn’t_. But there are a couple of other people who might know what he was doing last night and maybe even why he went to STAR Labs so late. I might even get to them before the cops do.”


	4. Hunter of Invisible Game

The adrenaline train I’d been riding since dawn finally ran out of fuel as I crossed Knight Street. I turned up Victoria Drive and found a coffee shop. I took my extra-large infusion of caffeine and vanilla syrup to a table and played a hunch. There weren’t that many places Allen could have met a doctor without his wife knowing about it as well. I figured it was either this or the coroner’s office.

_Caitlin Snow STAR Labs_ got me two solid results. The first one came off the academic database. A publication in last year’s American Journal of Incomprehensible Biology. Caitlin Snow was the third author. I opened another window and looked up what ‘cryonics’ meant, then wondered why one of the country’s top labs seemed to be dedicating millions of dollars to building a better refrigerator.

The second link confirmed the first. It was from a chain of publicity photos. Your donations hard at work, pushing the boundaries of research. The fact that the pushing was being done by two beautiful women certainly didn’t hurt. One of them was Caitlin Snow, the woman I’d seen last night ambushed by the photographer while giving an unguarded smile to some shiny new lab equipment. The other, who looked like she’d seen the picture coming, could have been Snow’s mirror: a slender, cool-eyed blonde that the caption told me was Doctor Louise Lincoln.

I finished my coffee and drove on to Halifax Towers. I checked the name on the list I’d made last night and then double-checked it against the mail slots. On a normal day, she’d probably be at the lab by now, but today was anything but normal and I gave it even odds she’d be home.

The block intercom buzzed a few times and then chirped at the far end. No answer. I tried it again. One more try before I threw in the towel and assumed she was in the lab or with the cops, which was probably the same thing today.

The line clicked open. I listened to the dead air for a second, waiting for an acknowledgement, but got nothing. I took a chance before it closed again.

“Hello? I’m looking for Doctor Snow?”

I heard something. It went from silent to painful so fast I had to jerk my head away. It was a second before I realised that the static wasn’t static. It was Spanish. Probably Spanish. The words came so fast I couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. Not that I’d have understood them anyway.

Ten seconds and the stream showed no signs of stopping so I interrupted, “Whoa, whoa! Doctor Snow? Is Doctor Snow there? Doctor Caitlin Snow?”

The third repeat bought me a pause. Then I got another volley. Somewhere in there were the words ‘not here’.

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

That got me four ‘nos’ in a row. Then, I thought, ‘doesn’t live here’.

I looked back at the mailboxes. Her name was still there, and though I couldn’t be sure, none of the names around it sounded like they’d be fluent in whatever I was hearing.

“Do you know where she is?”

More denials. These ones slow enough to be sure that the person on the other end of the intercom was male. But whoever it was didn’t give me anymore to work with. Three more buzzes and the line stayed closed.

I looked at the intercom panel, trying to guess if the dips in the steel were just screw-heads or if one of them hid a camera. No way to tell.

I dug a card out of my pocket and wrote Barry Allen’s name on it. On the way to my car I slipped it into Caitlin Snow’s mailbox. If she had moved in a hurry, I just hoped somebody would forward it.

* * *

Granville Street might come alive after dark, but before ten in the morning it was definitely dead. I had no trouble finding a parking spot opposite the Nemean Club and nobody saw me stroll down the steps. Fifty-fifty there was nobody inside yet, but I had to take the chance. These places had to be cleaned and re-stocked some time. Maybe the day staff would like me better.

I knocked till my knuckles ached. Then I gave them a break trying the buzzer. Then I went back to knocking.

The door opened and it looked like I was going to strike out again. It was the barman from the night before. Maybe he was senior. Maybe he was on last night’s early shift. Maybe he’d just drawn the short straw. He wore a fresh charcoal suit, but since he was off duty, he’d lost the jacket and loosened his tie.

“We’re closed,” he said. He pointed at the sign too, just in case I’d gone deaf.

“I know,” I said. “I was hoping to talk to you.”

“You have any ID that says you can?”

“What if I asked nicely?”

He shut the door. I started knocking again. He opened it.

“You’re not going to leave are you?”

“Sorry.” I wasn’t sorry.

I waited. He stepped through the door and shut it behind him. “What do you want to talk about?”

“There was a guy here last night about the same time as me. Tall, skinny, dark hair. Remember him?”

“No.”

“What about that stunning brunette he was with? You must remember her.”

“I prefer blondes. I’m a gentleman.”

“He spent ten minutes at the bar talking to you. Nobody takes that long to choose a cocktail.”

“Sorry.” He wasn’t sorry either.

I broke first. “Is your boss around?”

This made him smile. “You want to talk to my manager?”

Too late to back out now, I said, “Yeah.”

“Two minutes,” he said.

He went inside. I had a minute and a half to make a run for it, but I stayed where I was.

Lisa opened the door. She wore dark jeans, a pale blouse and working woman’s makeup. She looked me up and down and smiled.

“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon, Eddie. Do you want to come in?”

She led me past the barman. I wasn’t happy with him between me and the exit.

“It’s okay, Sam,” Lisa said, “I’ll take it from here.”

The bright day lights made the club look like an overdone waiting room. Sam went to find a bottle that needed his attention. I sat down at the table I’d used the night before.

“Drink, Eddie?”

“No. Thank you.”

Lisa joined me. Now that she’d got me into her parlour, she waited for me to start talking.

“You’re the manager,” I said. “Sam behind the bar figured I was a cop. He told you and you came over to see if he was right.”

“And I bought the jealous ex routine. Shame on me. I think I liked you better then.”

“Why?”

“Jealousy, a guy can get over. No cure for being a cop.”

“I know a few,” I said. “If I had a badge I’d have flashed it by now. My name’s Eddie Thawne. I’m a private detective.”

Lisa’s smile got a little hungry. “Then I should have offered you a cigarette. So you were working last night?”

“Yeah.”

“She have a husband?”

“Not that I know of. He has a wife. But I didn’t come here to ask about his social life.”

“Then why all the questions?”

“They split up after they left here. Did he tell Sam where he went?”

“Why?”

“He’s in trouble with the cops.”

She came to attention. “There are always cops eventually.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And they’ll probably be here this afternoon checking his alibi. He spent ten minutes at the bar talking to Sam. I just want to know what they talked about.”

Her smile slipped away. “Sorry Eddie. Sam doesn’t remember him at all.”

I got the message, loud and clear. “Anything I can do to change his mind?”

“Nice try,” Lisa said. “He won’t remember if the cops ask him either. Memory’s a funny thing.”

“Good for orders, bad for faces?”

“Something like that. Since all this guy did was have a couple of drinks, none of the staff are going to be able to say that _maybe_ he was here. If the cops even ask.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Sometimes they don’t bother. It depends what he did, I guess. What was it anyway?”

I thought about trying to shock some more information out of her. A good long look told me that wasn’t going to work.

“If he wasn’t here, then it doesn’t matter,” I said. “What’ve you got against cops?”

Lisa’s eyes turned to cold steel. “You don’t wanna know.”

She was right. I didn’t. But I was going to have to find out anyway.

* * *

I walked out of the Nemean Club feeling like I should check my back for knives. I stood on the sidewalk watching the traffic going up and down Granville Street. I bought a candy bar and ate it, counting taxis. Then I got in my car, drove along to Burand and headed north. I passed the long chain of luxury car dealerships, the low-rising brewery and then went around the curve into downtown Central City.

The buildings here were shards of glass. None of them were more than fifteen years old. None of them were lower than ten storeys. High-rising layers of companies aiming for the sky. High-rise apartments for the employees with a corner office firmly in their sights. Rents and mortgages higher still as people traded whatever they could spare for an address, no matter how few square feet came with it.

It went on until I hit West Cordova, and then there was a pause, as if the city itself were taking a breath. And then all I could see was STAR Labs.

It could swallow Michigan Stadium and come back for dessert. It employed enough people to run an aircraft carrier. In the last sixteen years it had won more scientific prizes than any other institution in the country. It had been the shock to the heart of a dying industrial city and the reason for everything I’d passed to get there.

Even with the lab’s founding father lying in the morgue there were still plenty of cars in the lot. Closing the place down would be harder than stopping a city, so the CCPD probably just cordoning off the areas related to the crime scene. It would make it a lot easier to find potential witnesses if they showed up for work like normal. I wondered how many had come in even though they didn’t have to, just to check if it was real.

The entrance hall had a giant virtual display front and centre. Twenty different areas, colour-coded by subject, details accessible at the touch of the screen. It didn’t surprise me. The place was so big even people who’d worked here for years could get lost on the way to the cafeteria.

I didn’t want to test my orienteering. I went straight up to the reception desk, figuring that there were some advantages to not being a cop. The woman behind it had an earpiece and a flat screen. She was hiding any shellshock behind a professional cover that could probably cope with everything from fire and theft to act of God.

“Welcome to STAR Labs,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, hi,” I said. “I’m looking for Detective Zolomon.”

The old routine slipped out so easily. She didn’t question it. She didn’t ask me who I was or if I had a badge. Nobody could say I was impersonating an officer.

“He’s probably in the administration wing,” she told me. “Third floor, take a left and follow the signs.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I took the elevator up. On the third floor, a right turn would have taken me towards the theoretical physics department. I turned left and started walking. It was pretty obvious the CCPD had been through here. A beat cop’s size tens made a trail of jagged scuffs in the floor. They followed faint track of a gurney. The two security doors at the entrance to the department were propped open. I found an employee bathroom just in time to dodge an idling patrol.

There were still people working. The clicks of keyboards and mice were muted. The two people still in the HR office stopped as I checked the door. Their eyes followed me, trying to guess what part I was here to play. In small conference room, a slim guy in a Harvard sweatshirt told a patrolman the story of his life. 

There were no signs, but leftover instinct told me that following the wheel marks would take me to the right place. I knew I was getting close when the wall decorations shifted from generic work-related headlines in _Scientific American_ and _Nature_ to pictures of people. One specific person.

Harrison Wells had the same needle-sharp build as Allen. The first photograph I found showed him in a pitch-perfect dark suit posing alongside President Bush. His expression was a little too neutral, like the leader of the free world wasn’t interesting enough to warrant his full attention. Around the next corner, an older Harrison Wells had the exact same look while receiving a handshake from Congressman Kenyon.

Then there was a picture that would have been more encouraging to his visitors. Wells in an informal black pullover with his dark hair scattering as he ran a hand through it. A pair of heavy-framed glasses hung forgotten from his other hand. His brows were raised in surprise and laughter in his eyes. He was sharing a joke with Professor Stephen Hawking.

 That image stayed with me as I turned the corner to the office door with Wells’ name on it. The door was open. There was crime scene tape across the entrance, but nobody inside. I could smell the fingerprint dust in the air and the aftertaste of plastic that followed the CSIs wherever they went. Allen’s colleagues had probably spent all night going through the room, and probably wouldn’t see a trace of their hard work. It would all have to be shipped to the lab over the bridge to avoid any accusations of physical or emotional contamination. All they’d left behind them was a light shower of canary-yellow evidence markers.

The office was even more slim-line than mine. The main desk curved around allowing four or five people to sit on the visitor side and focus all their attention on Wells. I couldn’t see a computer. If I hadn’t known the CSIs would have removed it, I’d have expected it to rise out of the polished metal.

The walls were almost bare. This didn’t look like the sort of office to bring a potted plant. The exception was the nebula-fronted starscape beside the door. There was just one wide window, looking out over the lake towards Keystone City. I wondered if he’d enjoyed the view. There but for the grace of Wells goes Central.

I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes to drive here from the Nemean Club. Make it fifteen by night. Ten minutes through the labyrinth to this door. Less if you knew the way. That left Allen nearly half an hour to… what?

I heard a step. I was on high alert before it faded, but it was too light and careless to be a cop. There were a few more, and then a woman came around the corner. She wore light-framed glasses over blue eyes that had been creased by years of thought. The honey colour was seeping out of her hair, but the strands it left behind were white rather than grey. Her posture was too straight, too stiff. Her blouse, skirt and shoes were the height of style, but none of them matched. Her eyes were a long way away.

I’d passed her in the photographs. She wasn’t centre-stage, but she was always there. Yesterday she’d been Doctor Tess Morgan, Abel prize-winning probability theorist and co-founder of STAR Labs. Today she was Harrison Wells’ widow.

“Can I get you anything, Doctor Morgan?” I asked.

She looked at me for a few seconds, probably trying to figure out if I was a minder sent by the cops or just a considerate member of the lab staff she didn’t know by sight.

“Some water? Coffee?” I added.

She gave me a diluted smile. “Thank you, but I think I’ve had enough coffee. Maybe when it wears off I’ll be able to sleep.”

I didn’t say anything. The smile became wide but dark. “I must look like I need it, right? God, what would Harrison say…”

I’d seen this before. She’d been awake all night. Reality was too close and too far away at the same time. Tears strangled the sentence.

I couldn’t have brought her coffee, or even water, but I could give her a tissue.

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know why I came back here. I kept hoping… When the officer called last night I thought something had happened to Jesse. It was getting late and she hadn’t called. And then they told me Harrison… and she’d _found_ him…”

I stood still, nameless and faceless. She was the victim’s wife. All night she’d been questioned about his movements, her own, when she saw him last, who his friends and enemies were, what their home life was like, how they worked together. Nobody had just talked to her.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Everybody’s sorry,” she whispered. “I’ve lost count of how many times someone’s said they’re _sorry_ and how much Harrison will be _missed_ and how he was such a _great scientist_.”

“That’s what Barry said,” I muttered, hating myself a little.

That stopped her. It almost looked like she was glad.

“Barry? Barry Allen? They asked about him.”

“We’re friends,” I said, taking another step towards hell. “I didn’t know he…”

“Really? He said he’d tell everyone he knew. They talked while he was here for his research project. He talked a lot. Very fast. He was like a very bright student. He looked much too young to be a police officer.”

“What did they talk about?”

That got me a little laugh, as Doctor Morgan warmed to the memory. “The labs. The future. He knew Harrison’s career better than I do. Better than Harrison…”

The light of those better days died away. “They think he had something to do with this,” she said.

“Do you?”

She sighed, shrinking against the wall. “I don’t know. They kept asking…”

She didn’t finish. This time she stopped herself. She straightened her back and looked me up and down. Her voice sharpened as she asked, “Who are you, exactly?”

I was beaten to my own answer. “Eddie! Somebody told me they’d seen you around.”

Detective Hunter Zolomon was a taller than almost everybody he met. He was also broad enough to take up most of the corridor. His brown hair was done in a swept-over style like somebody’s grandfather, and his suit had a vintage edge to it. Captain America out of uniform.

Zolomon looked like he was happy to see me. “Doctor Morgan,” he said, “this is Eddie Thawne, an old friend from Keystone. He’s a private detective.” His smile got wider. “Now Eddie, you didn’t do something really stupid and tell Doctor Morgan you were still a cop did you?”

“He didn’t say who he was,” Doctor Morgan said. “He just gave me a tissue and let me cry on his shoulder.” She turned back to me. “I hope you’re working, Mr Thawne?”

“I am,” I said. “For Barry Allen’s lawyer.”

Zolomon chuckled. “Really? I guess that explains it.” He turned and looked down at Doctor Morgan. “I’m going to have one of my officers take you home. You look like you need the rest.” He swung back again, switching the smile back on. “Anything else you want to ask Doctor Morgan, Eddie?”

Doctor Morgan crossed her arms. That told me I got one question, and I’d better make it good.

“Did your husband keep a gun in his office?”

That shook her. “He bought one a few years ago,” she said. “But I didn’t want it in the house. If he didn’t get rid of it, he might have brought it here.”  

“Thank you, doctor,” Zolomon said. “Come on, Eddie. I’ll walk you out.”

I said goodbye to Doctor Morgan. Zolomon gave me that much before he started herding me towards the elevators.

“Funny thing,” he said. “I only just got the call to say Barry Allen’s lawyer was at the station. What was the name again? Refresh my memory.”

I kept on walking.

“Doesn’t matter,” he went on. “It’s your business how you make a living. Just make sure you’ve got a very, very good reason before you come near my case with it.”

I switched the tracks on him. “Did Doctor Morgan tell you if Wells had any enemies?”

“Everybody’s got enemies, Eddie.”

“Not me.”

“Yeah? Check again tomorrow.”

“How about a mistress?”

Zolomon gave a loud sigh, like I just wasn’t living up to his expectations. We got to the elevator and he punched the button. “You’ve done too many divorces, Eddie. She says he didn’t, and you know they always know.”

We rode down together. Something told me I’d have an extra shadow till I was safely out of the building.

“What’s on the cameras?” I asked.

Zolomon stopped smiling. “That’s the trouble with scientists, Eddie. They think all the important stuff goes in a lab. The camera angles on the doors are the worst I’ve ever seen. Anybody can just walk in. We haven’t even got pictures of Wells, and we know he was here.” 

We stopped at the door. Waiting nearby was a van I recognised as the CCPD Scuba unit.

I turned around. I was one of the only people in the city he couldn’t look down at.

“So you think somebody came into the lab, shot Wells with his own gun, and then threw it in the river?”

“Maybe,” Zolomon said.

“Or Wells never kept it here and the perp brought their own.”

“I’ll let you know when we find the gun.”

“Unless it’s not down there.”

Zolomon smiled, unable to resist. “I don’t think so, Eddie. We’ve got a witness. Ask the lawyer.”

“I will.”

“See you round, Eddie,” he said.

I walked away. Zolomon wasn’t going to be trying very hard to find other suspects. He was just looking for evidence against the one he already had.


	5. Shackled and Drawn

My office hadn’t missed me. No messages. Only one email worth opening: a thank you from last week’s client. I left it unread. I’d save it for when I really needed it. 

I hit the search engines. Doctor Wells’ death was already the top of every news site from here to Gotham. So far it was just the headline. The thrilling details would start appearing soon. Wells’ fame as a scientist would be nothing compared to his status as a celebrity gone before his time, leaving a bereaved wife and beautiful daughter. It had started already. The country’s elite were campaigning for his secular canonisation in a hundred and forty characters or less.

The breaking news made it harder to reach the older stuff, and there wasn’t much of that. Wells wrote articles, gave interviews, made speeches, lunched and dined in the name of his stars and labs. What he didn’t do was talk about himself, his early life or his family. His education was a string of letters and dates. He’d gush about Tess Morgan’s theorems, but not which of them did the cooking. Once, last year, he’d refused to speculate on where his daughter would go to college; that was up to her.

I kept reading and the inbox stayed empty and the phone kept on not ringing. Then when the afternoon started I figured it was time for lunch. Or breakfast.

And then my cell phone buzzed.

“Eddie Thawne.”

“Mr Thawne, my name’s Sara Lance. I’m Barry Allen’s attorney. His wife asked me to call you. We need to talk.”

“Sure,” I said. “You eat?”

“If I have to.”

“Marty’s Pizza on West Broadway. Half an hour?”

“Okay, Mr Thawne.”

“Call me Eddie.”

She didn’t say anything, but the dial tone was very eloquent.

* * *

Marty’s was the kind of place you went for a pizza if you meant it. The dining area had the heavy, warm smell of baking bread that made you hungry as soon as you came through the door. I happened to know the family that owned it came from Naples, but the walls were decorated with black and white prints that ran from Venetian gondolas to an Alfa Romeo racing the Sicilian Targa Florio. The tables were packed close together out of an old-world traditionalism more than a desire to fit in more customers. Even so, it was almost impossible to eavesdrop on a neighbouring conversation since there was something about the place that made you want to talk fast and loud. Maybe it was the sparkling wine they served with everything.

The conversations hit a wall when Ms Sara Lance walked in. She moved like she’d studied dance instead of law, but by the fourth step I was thinking of a big cat. She wore a charcoal suit with a white blouse. Two tresses of blonde hair framed her face, the rest was secured in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were the colour of a winter sky.

We shook hands. She had a grip to intimidate cops. I got my hand back and we ordered pizzas and sparkling water. Hers was fizzing in the glass before she spoke.

“So you wanna play Paul Drake, huh?”

“I don’t know who that is,” I said.

“You never watched _Perry Mason_?”

“No.”

“My dad always liked the theme tune.”

“He’s a cop,” I said. “Captain Quentin Lance, SCPD. Your sister Laurel is an ADA up there. You’re down here working for the Public Defender’s Office. And pronouncing your name with an ‘h’ even though it doesn’t have one. That slowed me down.”

She looked at me like she might be impressed if I followed it with a rabbit out of a hat. “Iris said you used to be a cop.”

“That was five minutes on my cell phone before you got here,” I said.

“Not bad. But I’m thinking it was ten.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Would you trust a guy who volunteered to defend his ex-girlfriend’s husband from a murder charge?”

“I didn’t volunteer. She hired me. And if you were going to tell me she’d taken your advice and changed her mind then you wouldn’t have ordered.”

She drank some of her water, thinking. She smiled, the way sharks probably do.

“Okay, Eddie. You’ve got till we reach the cannoli.”

Gentlemen, start your engines. I said, “I haven’t seen the reports yet. Could Doctor Wells have committed suicide?”

“Coroner isn’t done yet, but I doubt it. The shot was close range into the abdomen. Awkward place to shoot yourself. No gun in the office. No residue on his hands. Nobody’s found a note yet. His wife said he was happy.”

There was doubt in her voice. I’d heard the story before. Families didn’t know as much as they thought. Suicides didn’t always leave a note. Proof, one way or the other, would have to come from the physical evidence.

“What about other suspects?” I asked.

“Nothing solid yet. You got any for me?”

“No. But I’ve got some people you might want to ask for an alibi.”

The clouds in her eyes danced. “Really? Are we talking actual suspects? Because I don’t think we can pin anything on Elon Musk, even after that argument they had about the Mars colonies.”

I shook my head. There’d been a debate at STAR Labs last year about a manned Mars mission. Wells had said the best way to do it was to take a one-way trip to start a permanent colony. Musk called him callous. Eight months later and there was still a proxy war going on across internet comment threads. Like all online arguments, this one was being fought to the death, but I couldn’t see it as a real motive. I had a couple of better candidates, but the pizzas interrupted me. Sara let me get a few mouthfuls in before I started to talk.

“If you want a science motive, try General Wade Eiling. He had a contract with a STAR Labs subsidiary doing military research. Some sort of animal experimentation. There was a leak to the press and Eiling ended up in front of a Senate committee trying to explain how torturing primates was going to win us the war in Afghanistan. Eiling said Wells leaked it himself.”

Ms Lance stabbed a rogue tomato like she had something against it. “An assassination? I didn’t peg you for a conspiracy nut.”

“Eiling called Wells an enemy of his country. You know what soldiers do to those.”

“Alright, I’ll look him up. Is that all?”

“No. Edward Raymond. Three years ago, STAR Labs was working on some kind of experimental miniaturised particle accelerator out in the Badlands. There was an accident and an engineer called Ronnie Raymond died. Wells paid the family and undisclosed sum in compensation, but they still blamed him.”

“Edward was Ronnie’s father?”

“Yeah. And yesterday was Ronnie’s birthday.”

Ms Lance went to work on her own cell phone. “Long way to Pittsburgh,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do about local PD. Anyone else?”

I tried not to take her tone personally. It wasn’t easy. “One more. Dr Arthur Light. Used to work for STAR Labs till Wells fired him. Light tried to sue. The case was thrown out when four female employees testified that Light had been harassing them.”

“Some guys don’t like to hear ‘no’,” Ms Lance said.

There was something dangerous in her eyes for a minute. I didn’t look away, but only because you’re supposed to stare down tigers. Then whatever it was curled up again and she went back to her pizza.

“The case was dismissed,” I said. “Light was dragged out of the court yelling about how Wells and ruined his career because Wells saw him as a threat.”

“We could look him up,” Ms Lance said. “If the DA tries to build a case on circumstantial evidence, then I want to make sure we’ve got circumstances pointing to somebody else too.”

I spotted the pronoun. “We’re ‘we’ now?”

“We’re getting there. How do you know Wells wasn’t just killed by some lone whack-job because God or Allah or the voices in his head told him?”

I’d thought about it. A lot of the time a simple solution is the right one, but sometimes they’re too simple.

“I don’t. But whoever did this knew the weaknesses in STAR Labs security. They didn’t just walk in off the street. And if they were crazy, why hide? And if this was some sort of anti-science domestic terrorism, where’s the big online splash claiming responsibility and credit? If somebody killed Wells on a crusade, then they’d want everybody else to know about it. Did he get any death threats?”

“His wife didn’t mention any.”

“Captain Singh has a whole station full of cops wanting to do something,” I said. “Ask one of them to check the reports. Shouldn’t be a problem since it’s got nothing to do with Barry Allen.”

Ms Lance chewed the last of her pizza. She finished her water. The waiter appeared, like they always do when a women like that needs attention.

“Cannoli, please. You want one, Eddie? Okay, two.”

She waited until the water was gone, and then said, “An army general, a grieving parent, a former employee and maybe a crazy. Are those all the alternatives?”

I went back to the PI’s lowest common denominator. “Doctor Morgan didn’t think he was being unfaithful. Maybe she’s got a boyfriend. Or maybe the daughter likes bad boys.”

“Maybe. I guess you’d be the guy to find out.”

The cannolis appeared on the table without a sound. I looked at them, then at her. She smiled.

“Okay, Eddie, you get to stay Iris’ shop-soiled Galahad.” The smile stayed, but the blue in her eyes went as cold and hard as steel. “But screw me around or do anything to jeopardise my case, I’ll have them dragging the lake for what’s left of you. Understand?”

“Loud and clear,” I said.

“Good.”

We ate the cannolis. They were good, but it felt like something much more important than dessert.

“So now that I work for you, what did Allen say?”

“We’re skipping the coffee,” she said. “He won’t say anything.”

“About what?”

The little twitches I’d hardly noticed during the meal suddenly got a lot louder. “Anything. He won’t talk. Not to me, or Iris, or the cops trying to interview him. I just spent half an hour trying to find out if he really was at STAR Labs last night like Jesse Wells said. Not a goddamn word.”

I couldn’t think of a response. I asked for the check to pass the time. I’d arrested criminals who thought pleading the Fifth meant you didn’t have to talk to the police. But I’d never met anybody crazy enough to clam up with their own lawyer.

“You told him it was all covered by privilege?”

She forgave me Attorney 101. “Yeah.”

“And that you couldn’t help him if he didn’t talk?”

 “Yeah.”

“And that Zolomon probably isn’t going to let him go till he says something?”

“Yeah.”

“And Iris told him the same?”

She got less forgiving. “Yes.”

“Then let me try.”

She blinked a few times. “What are you going to do?”

“Bad cop,” I said.

* * *

Allen was ready and waiting for us when we got back to the station. He was being kept in a secure consultation room that you only had to pass one locked door to reach. No two-way mirror, no official voice recorders, no security cameras.  Private, if you ignored the detention officer outside with the holstered automatic.

I went in alone. The door was locked behind me. Allen sat behind the table, slouched and staring at me. His hands and legs were free, but he didn’t look like he wanted to go anyway. Zolomon had come for him first thing in the morning and he was wearing whatever he’d had time to pull on: jogging pants and a hooded sweater from Berkley. He hadn’t even had time to shave, not that it made a difference to that baby face of his.

We probably had a lot in common, not just Iris. She’d told me a lot about him. Even if Allen hadn’t heard about me around the station, she would have told him what little there was to know if he didn’t mind hearing about her ex-boyfriends. But we’d never properly met until I sat down opposite him, thinking this was a hell of a way to do it for the first time.

Allen didn’t say anything. I could see the questions zipping through his mind. What was an ex-cop without a badge doing here on a day contending to be the worst of his life. I didn’t keep him in suspense.

“I’m Eddie Thawne. I’m a private investigator. I work for your lawyer.”

The first syllable of a question reached his lips and stopped there.

“Ms Lance told me that you didn’t want to talk about why you went to STAR Labs last night. How about where you were before? I thought we could talk about that.”

His eyes flickered. If he’d let himself speak, he’d have lied. Probably about being alone in his lab all evening.

“Why’d you go to the Nemean Club with Caitlin Snow?”

I pretended not to see the wide eyes and the almost-dropped jaw. I took the cell phone out of my pocket and played the video of the two of them talking at the table. I cut it off before he went to the bar.

I chose my next words very carefully. “You fucking her, Allen?”

His jaw snapped closed so hard I heard it click. Anger swept the confusion from his face. His whole body seemed to coil up, waiting for the slightest excuse to spring at me. For the first time, I wondered where ‘too far’ was with this guy and what would happen when he got there.

“Iris doesn’t think you are,” I said, putting all the casual familiarity I could into the use of his wife’s name. “Neither does Ms Lance. And I have to say it doesn’t _look_ like you are. The reason Iris hired me to follow you in the first place is that she wanted to know where you were going. Well, now we know. But we don’t know why you and your friend from STAR Labs went out last night.”

He didn’t miss the last part. The anger was gone in a blink. Now I was looking at the scientist. He was backtracking through my arguments, figuring the data I’d used to draw my conclusions. I laid it all out for him.

“You left the station and went over to her place. She drove the two of you to the club. You had some drinks. You talked to the barman. She went home. You went to STAR Labs. Come on Allen, I’m a good PI and I was a good cop before that. You want to fill in the blanks? Why’d you go to the labs? Did you want to see Doctor Wells?”

The world’s twitchiest statue didn’t say anything.

I acted bored. “What about a freebie? What did you and the doctor talk about over drinks?”

Still no answer. Just a feeling that Allen should never take up poker.

“Did you shoot Wells?” I asked. “You’re sure acting like it. Zolomon probably thinks you did. He’s just looking for enough evidence to charge you. You could save him some time and give him the motive too. He’ll like that. Biggest murder this town’s ever seen and he solves it by dinner time. I bet that’ll show his friends at the FBI what they’re missing.”

The little flickers on his face stopped like I’d flipped a switch. So Allen did know how to do that after all.

“I’d better not say too much. I’m stealing his lines. He’s going to be looking forward to using them on you himself. Give him a chance to be a real cop again.”

He got old while I watched him. He’d been sitting in that chair for a thousand years. He’d stay there for a thousand more.

“Okay, so you’re going to make me dig. Fine. I don’t care if you’re guilty or innocent. I get paid either way.”

I got out of the chair and walked to the door. Gave him a couple of seconds, then rapped on it. The cop on the other side opened it. I might have been leaving an empty room.

Iris and Ms Lance were in the corridor. Nobody said you couldn’t listen the old fashioned way. They walked me to another private room.

“Was that really necessary?” Iris asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

“Why?”

“Barry’s a bad liar.”

She crossed her arms, squeezing herself tightly, keeping the emotions under pressure. “I knew that already. What was the point? He didn’t say anything.”

“Exactly,” Ms Lance said. So we were all on the same page.

“Is that your theory, Eddie? Barry isn’t talking because he doesn’t want to say too much?”

“Yeah. And it’s got something to do with that club and Doctor Snow. He’s really worried about that. Do you know if the police have spoken to her yet?”

“Not that they’ve told me,” Ms Lance said.

“I could try,” Iris said.

“No chance,” Ms Lance said. “That would sink us at a trial. What I need you to do, Iris, is go home and look through all of Barry’s files and his papers and the stuff he thinks you don’t know about. Find anything to do with Harrison Wells or STAR Labs. Anything about that club and anything to do with Doctor Snow. Okay?”

The reply took a long time. “Okay.”

She left. I looked at Ms Lance. “You think she’ll find anything?”

“Don’t know, but somebody’s gotta do it and it might as well be a trained investigator.”

“Yeah, if there is something, she’ll find it. What are you going to do?”

“You were right, I figure they’re working up to a murder charge. So I gotta talk to the ADA for the case and build a defence. Of course, it’d help a lot if I could talk to my client, but luckily for him, I am very, very good.”

“The DA won’t like this. Nobody’s saying it yet, but if this even gets to a trial then every criminal put away on Allen’s evidence is going to roll the dice and appeal.”

“That would be why the captain looks so pissed off.”

I dared a smile. “Probably. But with him, it could be anything.”

Ms Lance’s stare was a very specific warning. Before she could follow it up there was a barrage of knocking. Patty came in and went straight for Ms Lance.

“Hi. You’re Barry’s lawyer, right? I’m Patty. Detective Spivot.” Then, when Ms Lance had accepted her staccato handshake, she turned to me. “Eddie, I just saw Iris. She said Barry was at the Nemean Club last night.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Are you sure?”

“I saw him there myself.”

“Okay,” Patty said. “Okay. I didn’t say anything to Iris, because I wasn’t sure if I should. I’m not sure if I should say anything to you either, but I’m not on the case and Barry’s my friend.”

She stopped. Stopped herself. I looked at Ms Lance, asking for an official tag-in.

“It’s okay, detective. If it’s not confidential, we can always say we found out some other way.”

Patty gave her a weak smile. “I guess it’s pretty common knowledge around here. You might have known already. Or Eddie. Because Joe knows so I think Barry would but I’m not sure about Iris.”

“ _What_ , detective?”

“The Nemean Club is owned and run by Lisa and Leonard Snart.”

I had to check I’d heard it right. “ _The_ Leonard Snart? The bank robber?”

“Who is this guy?”

Both Patty and I looked at Ms Lance like she didn’t know the name of the president. There probably wasn’t anybody in law enforcement on either side of the bridge that didn’t know this story. It was one of the CCPD’s campfire tales.

I gave her the full legend. “ _Lewis_ Snart was a career criminal. Only he was lousy at it. Spent most of his time inside. Mostly small stuff, but got ambitious enough to try bank robbery. _Try_. He did five jobs and got caught every time. His two kids, Leonard and Lisa, were raised by their grandfather while he was in prison.

“Lisa was a delinquent, got into fights, dated guys who robbed gas stations but never got into too much trouble. Leonard was more ambitious. Started out with small-time hood stuff and worked his way up. He got a crew, pulled some jobs, did some time. Then, back in ’94, he went for the big time and robbed five banks, one after another, in one week. The same five that his father tried to take. The jobs were planned to the second. CCPD was only able to prove enough for one conviction and Snart only got five years. When he got out he just vanished.”

Patty’s nod gave me the seal of approval and then she told us the epilogue. “A few years ago, Lisa Snart bought a club on Granville. The Nemean. As far as anybody knows it was all legitimate, but you’d better believe that some of the older officers tried to prove it wasn’t. And her brother’s the silent partner. There were some reports about what happened if people bothered their business, but not from the sort of guys who’d press charges.”

“Sounds like the sort of place they’d spot a cop,” Ms Lance said. “Or even a CSI.”

“It is,” I said. 

“They make you, Thawne?”

The knock that saved me was a familiar pattern, like a joke in Morse Code.

“Yeah?” Sara called.

Zolomon swung the door open. Ms Lance held her hand out for the sort of shake that said that if she were wearing rings, she’d count them afterwards.

“Detective Spivot.”

“Detective Zolomon,” Patty said, and her boots left skid marks as she cleared out.

“What can I do for you, detective?” Ms Lance asked.

“I just came down to make sure you have everything you need.”

“I do.”

“Have you spoken to your client?”

“Yeah.”

Zolomon heard the hesitation. “Has he spoken to you?”

Her stance didn’t surrender the point. I didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” Zolomon said. “Maybe he thinks he’s being smart. Learning from experience.”

“What experience?” I asked.

I swear I said it out loud. Zolomon and Ms Lance didn’t seem to agree.

“While we wait for him to change his mind,” Ms Lance said. “There’s a couple of other angles I’m going to look into.”

A piece of paper appeared between Zolomon’s fingers. He gave it a long look, even though he already knew what was on it.

“Oh, do you mean like General Eiling at DARPA, Ed Raymond in Pittsburgh, and the threats made by Doctor Arthur Light? I’ve got officers chasing those now. I’ll be sure to send you the reports.”

“Thank you,” Ms Lance said, and I could hear a very different first word.

“We’re also checking for major threats made against Doctor Wells. But of course we can’t arrest every crazy on Twitter.”

He chuckled. Ms Lance bared enough teeth for it to be mistaken for a smile.

“You seem pretty sure you’ve got the right guy,” she said.

“I am, Ms Lance. It’s not like I agree with genetic profiling or anything like that, but you have to admit that someone who grew up in the shadow of violence might one day want to use it to solve their own problems.”

Ms Lance doesn’t break so I did. “What the hell are you talking about, Detective Zolomon?”

“Oh,” Zolomon said. “Oh wow. You really don’t know, do you? I thought you were just being delicate, Ms Lance.”

Ms Lance looked at me. The steel in her eyes would have cut me in half if she’d seen any sign I knew what Zolomon was talking about.

“What don’t we know?”

“Something very important about your client’s family history,” Zolomon said. “I’ll leave you alone to look it up. Or, better yet, why don’t you ask Iris West-Allen why she doesn’t have a mother-in-law?”


	6. The Sins of Somebody Else’s Past

Ms Sara Lance said, “Oh shit.”

I would have said the same, except there was a lady present. And I was too busy reading to pick the most suitable curse.

Iris hadn’t told me everything about Barry, because there’s only so much a guy can hear about his girlfriend’s male best friend before his mind starts playing what he hopes are tricks but sometimes aren’t. She’d never mentioned his folks. Any other client, I’d have searched his name as soon as I’d taken the job. This time I hadn’t, because I thought I knew him.

The two headlines were seventeen years old, almost to the day. The first was the calm before the storm. A handsome, professional woman, her hair loose around her shoulders, with a smile that asked for faith and trust. Nora Allen, partner in an accountancy firm, thirty-nine years old. The next picture was the wreckage of Henry Allen. A solid man who could have been a community’s physical pillar being walked out of his house with a patrolman holding an arm behind his back, both of them recoiling from the night-time camera flash. The white-on-night exposure brought out all the contrasts: the shattered suburbia, the cop, the man with blood on his shirt. The headline itself was just icing. Local doctor charged with stabbing his wife to death.

“You didn’t know about this?” Ms Lance asked again.

“No. Iris told me she and Allen practically grew up together. She never said _why_. Maybe she thought I knew.”

“Detective West knew,” she said. “And Barry would have declared it when he joined the CCPD. But she didn’t tell me.”

“Will it affect the case?”

“I don’t know. It wouldn’t work as evidence but it’s obviously shaping Zolomon’s investigation. Of course, none of that matters because Allen won’t goddamn _talk_ to anybody.”

I checked the story again. “This might be why he won’t. His dad denied the charges.”

“Yeah, after the neighbours heard them arguing, heard his wife scream and the cops found him next to her body covered in blood.”

“Maybe he should just have blamed a one-armed man,” I said.

Ms Lance stopped looking so much like she wanted to put her fist through the laptop screen. “So you do watch old tv after all.”

“I thought it was a movie.”

She took a few yoga breaths. “Alright, well, I need to get some advice on this. This case is turning into a real mess. What time is it?”

“Nearly five.”

“Gotta be fast then. You find out anything, you call me, alright?”

I wondered how long our working relationship would have to last before she stopped delivering instructions with an unspoken threat at the end.

“Sure,” I said.

She slipped the laptop into her bag and left. I stayed where I was. A couple of pairs of feet went up and down the hallway outside. Nobody came to check on me or kick me out. The room was used for meetings, and according to Patty, would be free until the end of the shift. I thought about passing the time with stretches or breathing exercises, anything to stop feeling like I’d aged a decade since this morning. In the end I just stood up and did a few laps of the table.

I checked my cell phone. There’d been a tip line open since the press conference. Anyone who’d been in the vicinity of STAR Labs last night was encouraged to call in and say what they’d seen. Somewhere was a team of detectives not getting paid nearly enough to comb through that collection of crazies, attention seekers and genuine but unhelpful passers-by for any real clues.

Zolomon had made an addition since I’d last looked. A picture of Barry Allen. It had been cropped out of a group photo and somebody had used a couple of Instagram filters to muddy the waters of how it was taken. According to the site, the man in the picture was a potential witness who the police wanted to contact and needed the public’s help to find.

An appeal for the vital statistics of somebody already secure in the station could only have come from Zolomon. I wondered if he’d bothered asking anyone to sign off on it. I wondered if he needed the permission. I’d seen that before. The rules get a lot softer when you’ve got to wade through a sea of journalists to get the job done.

The screen snapped to black as my cell phone started vibrating. I nearly dropped it. Withheld number. I really didn’t want to talk to a stranger about politics, but I took a chance and answered.  

“Thawne.”

“You the detective?”

The accent wasn’t so thick I’d need a chainsaw to get through it this time. It was clearer on the phone line than it had been through the intercom this morning.

“Yeah. Who is this?”

“Friend of Doctor Snow.  You a real PI?”

“My website’s on the card.”

“Anybody can buy a website, _esse_.”

“Then look me up,” I said. “There’s a picture of me in CCPN from back when I was still a cop.”

The line went quiet. So quiet I had to check the screen to see I hadn’t lost the connection. Then: “Her place. One hour. You’re honest, she’ll let you in.”

Then he really did kill the call.

I got my car out of the station garage and drove up to Nelson. Jitters was a coffee shop in the same way that the _Titanic_ was a ferryboat. It was a warehouse of caffeine, a social club for anybody too young to buy liquor, and a wi-fi library. The staff took their jobs very seriously. They’d even pick you out one of the thousand combinations from the board if you asked them when the shift was slow. Which was how a strung-out junior detective figured out how to start talking to a beautiful barista with dreams of writing, once up on a time.

Come for the coffee, stay for the connection. I put my laptop on the table, pulled up a vanilla latte and read everything I could find on the Allen family. Nora had made partner at Fox and Lambert, one of the biggest accounting firms in the city. Henry was senior anaesthesiologist at Central City Hospital. Barry had just come second in the school science fair with a bottle rocket which was more recyclable than anything SpaceX could manage. Sure, the couple argued some time, said the friends and neighbours, but what couple doesn’t? They were astonished that Doctor Allen was arrested, and horrified when he was charged, but then they were doctors, accountants and housewives.

Nobody asked the father of Barry’s best friend. Joe West wouldn’t have been shocked. When a woman dies, the first people the cops look at is the men in her life, because it’s usually one of them. If a wife dies, five will get you ten it was her husband. 

Henry Allen had protested his innocence to the papers, the cops and the judge. He’d blamed a home invasion until the cell doors had cut him off. Iron Heights, murder two, fifteen to life.

I ran out of time, shut those thoughts back inside the laptop and headed for Halifax Towers. Parking was tougher. I wasn’t surprised all the residents had their own lot. It was a long walk to get me to the door.

I buzzed. This time the intercom buzzed back and let me into the lobby. There were two elevators, one big enough to move up furniture or maybe a loaded football team. The smaller one was the same blue-grey as the building’s walls. The floor was dented but the walls were polished clean.

It dropped me off into a cream-walled corridor. I followed the rigid branches to Doctor Snow’s apartment. There was another intercom, but I was getting tired of those, so I knocked.

The guy who opened the door was wearing blue jeans and loose t-shirt with a map of the galaxy as sponsored by Google. He had bronze skin and black hair all the way down to the collar of his three-shades-of-grey hooded sweatshirt. His eyes were a heavy brown and he had a full mouth which wasn’t smiling. The dusting of stubble around it didn’t cover his youth. I had about five years and six inches on him, but he stared me down anyway. 

“You Thawne?” he asked.

“Drop the act, kid,” I said. “I’ve had really a long day.”

“Aw man,” he said, the accent retreating towards the horizon. “How’d you know?”

“I’m a detective,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. I saw the newspaper. You didn’t say you got shot. Seriously, how did you know?”

His head tilted and his lips parted, like he was too busy thinking to worry about them now. I put my hands on my hips. He didn’t seem to notice. I figured I was going to have to answer his question if I wanted to get inside. It was either that or hit him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

“That… whatever it was over the intercom this morning? When you were trying to get me to go away. You’re bilingual right? Speak Spanish with the family?”

“Yeah. Ever since I was a kid.”

“You weren’t speaking English like you’re still learning it. You got your grammar mistakes in the wrong places.”

He also couldn’t keep a grip on that fake accent and was trying way too hard to sound tough, but I didn’t say that. Now that I’d seen him, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

I got a reward a few seconds later. The deep thought look went away and he gave me a smile that probably rated high-factor sunblock.

“That’s really cool. I never thought I’d meet a real PI. What’s it like?”

“Busy,” I said. “Can I talk to Doctor Snow?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, checking the corridor. “Sure. Come in.”

We went inside. Caitlin Snow lived in a furniture catalogue. The floor was brown wood with an artistic contrast to the shelves and cabinets. The walls were a spotless white and the carpet in the main room was cream. There wasn’t a trace of dust on the wall-mounted tv and I couldn’t see a single hair on the grey triangular couches. They’d been arranged in the centre of the room with a set square and the distance to the walls in every direction was probably constant to the millimetre. There were a couple of framed pictures on the shelves and a single, unrecognisable piece of art as counterpoint to the television. It might just have been there to prove the place was occupied.

“Cisco, did you hear the door?”

Doctor Snow walked out of her bedroom and stopped, turning to ice in front of me. Her idea of casual around the house was a long-sleeved lilac blouse and tight black pants. Her amber eyes were wide, flaring against her pale skin.

“Cisco who is this?” she asked in a Medusa hiss.

“He’s Eddie Thawne,” Cisco said. “He’s…”

Doctor Snow’s memory beat him to the answer. “I’ve seen you before,” she said. “You were at the bar last night. Who are you?”

I moved my arm, just to check it wasn’t granite, and held it out. “I’m Eddie Thawne. I’m a private investigator.”

“Why were you following me?”

“I wasn’t,” I said. “I was following Barry Allen. I work for his wife.”

“You work for Iris?”

“You know her?”

“Feels like it,” Cisco said. “Barry wouldn’t stop talking about her. That’s why I called him, Caitlin. I saw Barry on the news. I think he might be in trouble. The cops have an online appeal for him, which is really weird because they’ve gotta know who he is. I think it’s got something to do with… what happened to Doctor Wells.”

“Cisco, okay,” Doctor Snow said, promising a long conversation when I was gone. “What do you want, Mr Thawne?”

“I just want to talk to you about Barry.”

“Is he in trouble?”

“Yeah,” I said.

She didn’t ask any more. “Sit down,” she said, pointing to exactly where she wanted me. “This is Cisco Ramon.”

“Hi,” Cisco said. He sat next to her, leaving me facing a united front.

“Where do you work at STAR Labs, Cisco?” I asked.

“Mechanical engineering,” Cisco said, with a challenge in his voice like he expected me to think he just cleaned Doctor Snow’s test tubes.

“How do you know Barry Allen?”

Cisco looked at Doctor Snow. Her story, if she wanted to tell it. If not, he’d do it for her.

“Doctor Wells introduced us,” Doctor Snow said. “Do you know about his research project for the CCPD? Doctor Wells thought it was win-win. The police got some state of the art equipment and STAR Labs got free field testing and real-world data.”

“It would have made a great demo,” Cisco said. “If the cops couldn’t break our stuff, nobody could.”

Doctor Snow said, “Doctor Wells brought Barry to my department because we work on cryonics. That’s the preservation of biological organisms using extremely low temperatures. We aren’t nearly advanced enough for suspended animation of humans, but we have had success with tissue samples. Barry was looking into forensic applications, whether we could isolate and preserve evidence at a crime scene. It would simplify the sampling procedures and drastically reduce the risk of contamination.”

“And did it work?”

“In the lab,” Doctor Snow said. “Not so well outside controlled conditions.”

The admission of imperfection sounded like it caused her pain.

“Some of it was how portable the stuff wasn’t,” Cisco said. “Hard work dragging all that equipment and super-cooled liquid around with you. That’s where I come in. Miniaturisation, that’s my thing. They build it, I build it _smaller_. I could probably put together a cryo-generator small enough to fit in a briefcase.”

“Yes, Cisco, and we’ve discussed why that would be a bad idea.”

I knew that undertone when I heard it. We’re not having this conversation in front of the guests.

“So both of you worked with Barry on evidence preservation?”

“Mostly,” Cisco said. “I also hooked him up with some of the guys in the optics team. Some of their new spectrographs are _amazing_. But we hung out too, you know? Ate lunch together, sat at the cool table in the cafeteria. The guy’s seen almost as many movies as I have.”

“Do you know if he spent much time with Doctor Wells?”

Cisco tilted his head, passing the conversation back to Doctor Snow. “I think Doctor Wells liked him,” she said. “Obviously he was busy, but when he could, he would eat lunch with the rest of the staff. And if Barry was there, he would invite him over. He said if Barry ever wanted, he could apply to STAR Labs.”

“What did Barry say?”

“He declined. Politely. His job at the crime lab is very important to him.”

The look they shared lasted for an eyeblink. A question neither of them had an answer to. A crack in the story I was going to have to prise open.

“Doctor Snow, why did you and Barry go to the Nemean Club last night?”

She looked at Cisco again, longer. She asked a question in eyelash semaphore. He replied with a press, shoulder to shoulder. 

“We didn’t just talk about movies,” she said.

“What else did you talk about?”

“Hartley Rathaway.”

I guess the name must have left a mark, because Cisco said, “You know who that is, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Central City’s own Lindbergh Baby.”

“Only this one was all grown up.”

“Rich kid,” I said. “Had a big fight with his parents, walked out of the family and fell of the face of the Earth.”

“That’s the story everyone knows,” Doctor Snow said.

“He wasn’t just rich,” Cisco said. “Guy was a genius. A prodigy. Like… almost as smart as Doctor Wells. They worked together, setting up STAR Labs. Doctor Wells said half their opening projects were Hartley’s ideas.”

“Everyone hoped that when the labs opened, he would come back,” Doctor Snow said. “But he didn’t.”

“This is what you talked to Barry about?”

The shoulder pressure reversed. Cisco said, “Barry had a thing for unsolved crimes. I guess you know what happened to his mom? He said his dad didn’t do it. He said that was why he became a CSI. Maybe one day he’d be able to find out who really did.”

“I suppose it was natural that he got interested in the Rathaway case while he was at STAR Labs,” Doctor Snow said. “He read everything he could find about it. He even talked to some staff who worked there at the time. Of course, lots of people have tried that. He said the file still gets opened at CCPD every few years, but nobody wants the job.”

I remembered that. The Cold Case Russian Roulette. “Did he say why he thought he could do better?”

“I don’t know if he thought he could,” she said. “But he’s a scientist. If he didn’t try, he’d never know.”

“Did he ever talk to Doctor Wells about it?”

“We don’t know,” they both said, very fast.

“What does this have to do with the club?” I asked.

Another conversation in the silence. A push one way, a push the other. I waited.

“He said he’d found something,” Cisco said.

“About Rathaway?”

“Yeah. He didn’t say what it was, but he said it was important.”

“He was going to meet someone at the club to talk about it,” she said. “He wanted to go alone, but I insisted. I thought he’d stand out less if he was with me. I was worried.”

“Did he say who he was meeting?”

“No. We had some drinks at the club. He went to the bar a few times. Nothing happened. I suppose you saw all of that.”

“What about when you left?”

“I went home. Alone. He said he was going to pick up his car from the station. He didn’t, did he?”

I shook my head. Another piece for their jigsaw. I had a minute at most before they figured it out. I threw a curve, asking something I was pretty sure I already had the answer to.

“You and Barry, you didn’t get… too close, did you?”

Cisco took it for a joke. “Dude, he’s married.”

“Just for the record,” I said.

Doctor Snow’s eyes promised me a long relaxing swim in liquid nitrogen. “No,” she said.

“Okay. Did either of you know Ronnie Raymond?”

I hadn’t expected a bullseye. It hit Doctor Snow hard enough to crack the ice.

“We did,” she whispered. “I did. Before the accident… I think he was going to ask me something. I never got the chance to answer.”

For a moment, I wasn’t there. Cisco put his hand on hers. She squeezed it. She smiled a smile from when she’d been someone else. It was as bright and rare as a rainbow.

When they were back, I had to give the old wound another nudge. “Do you ever hear from Ronnie’s father?”

“No,” Cisco said. “Not for a couple of years, right?”

“Right.”

By then I was as eager to leave the memories as they were. “What about Doctor Arthur Light? Did you ever meet him?”

“No,” Doctor Snow said. “I stayed away from him. My team leader, Doctor Lincoln, warned me to keep my distance if I could. He assumed any woman in a position of authority had gotten there on her back. She said he had trouble hearing the word ‘no’. After Doctor Wells fired him, Doctor Lincoln was one of the women who testified. I don’t know who the others were.”

“Any chance I could talk to Doctor Lincoln?”

Cisco gave his best impression of a grin to get us all out of Doctor Light’s shadow. “The Snow Queen’s in Alaska right now. We’re got a timeshare research station up on the Arctic Circle.”

“Cisco, please don’t call her that.”

“Sorry.”

Doctor Snow took the last step in their old dance and turned back to me. “How do the police think Barry is involved with Doctor Wells’ death?”

I was under a microscope. An electron microscope. Every reaction recorded and catalogued.

“They’re looking for evidence to charge him,” I said.

“They think Barry did it?” Cisco said. His hands raked across his face, pressed his eyelids, dragged his hair, like he was trying to push the screen away, end the show. “ _Barry_? Barry Allen? For real? That’s fucking nuts.”

Doctor Snow was a void next to him. She only moved to breathe.

“Mr Thawne, I’d like you to leave now.”

The consultation was over. I got up, picked up my notes, and headed for the door. She opened it for me. I held out a card.

“If you think of anything else that might help, Doctor Snow.”

“I’ll tell the police,” she said. “Goodbye, Mr Thawne.”

I went out. I waited for her to slam the door behind me. It clicked closed so quietly I hardly heard it.


	7. Murder Incorporated

I had dinner in a Japanese restaurant on the joint where Central Avenue changes into Kingsway and crawls down into the city’s copy-and-paste south-eastern suburbs. That was just one of the ways the miniature mall had to flag down passing commuters. A gas station so you didn’t go home empty. Groceries at the end of a whole day forgetting to buy milk. A liquor store for a long evening of self-reflection. A couple of restaurants if you couldn’t face dinner or didn’t want to do your drinking on an empty stomach.

The place had aspirations of a franchise. The bowls were imitating earthenware and would be easily swapped for takeout plastic. The staff outfits were nearly uniform, but I doubted they’d been any closer to Japan than Coast City. The restaurant’s name was everywhere the owners could think to put it, from the signs to the aprons to the designer menus that they must have sold a lot of sushi to afford. The portions were as drilled, organised and personality free as the guys in my father’s parade-ground photos.

The katsu chicken came with curry sauce, shredded vegetables, sticky rice and a pair of chopsticks. I looked the waitress in the eye and asked for a fork.

I ate slowly, giving my mind plenty of time to change. It didn’t. Then I mixed a cup of coffee with the aftertaste of the curry. I couldn’t remember how many cups I’d had since Iris’ call that morning. My cardiologist would not have approved, but what he didn’t know probably wouldn’t hurt me.

I couldn’t say the same about heading back up Granville. 

The Nemean Club was busier than it had been the night before. It felt like the lights were lower and the music was louder. Conversations were a turbine-whir underneath the rhythm and blues renditions of songs that were auto-tuned synths when I heard them on the radio. Most of the noise was coming from a beehive of women who’d turned one of the longer tables into a class reunion and decorated it with a rainbow of drinks. I had to turn my back on a blue-eyed challenge and walk up to Sam at the bar. There was nothing in his look I could read, but I guess bartenders get pretty good at that.

“What’s in a gimlet?” I asked.

Sam flipped the cocktail menu open. Either he had a great memory or good luck, because it settled in front of me on the right page.

“Gin and lime juice.”

“Okay, I’ll try one.”

He mixed it up but didn’t stay to see me drink it. Further down the bar, two young guys in disassembling suits were starting their weekend early with James Bond Martinis. By the time the men had given their orders, I could see Sam wondering how much damage he could do with just an olive on a stick.

He came back over. I was the lesser of two evils.

I raised the half a drink I had left. “This is good.”

Sam found a glass to clean. He watched the party behind me in case any of them were getting thirsty again.

I tilted my head towards the men of mystery. “Aren’t those supposed to be made with gin?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “They’re meant to be stirred, too.”

“Maybe it’s a British thing,” I said.

Sam didn’t say anything. Bartenders probably like talking about drinks as much as teachers want to tell you about this year’s SAT scores.

“This as busy as it gets on a Thursday?”

That got me a shrug. I loaded the big guns.

“Cops show up yet?”

He stopped cleaning. “Just you.”

“I’m not a cop,” I said. “CCPD’s holding the guy I was asking about this morning. Barry Allen. You should try to remember his name this time.”

“What did he do?”

“Material witness in a murder investigation. Says he doesn’t know anything, but they’re not buying. If you don’t remember what he wanted when he was here, do you remember if he came back?”

“No.”

I didn’t think he was going to be more specific, so I said, “His girlfriend thought he was coming here to meet someone. Anybody come in afterwards asking about him?”

“Just you.”

“I guess you must get a lot of people in here,” I said. Then, like I’d gotten distracted, “Ever get anybody famous?”

“A ball player once or twice. And somebody coming up on the rink. I can’t remember the names.”

“How about Harrison Wells?”

“The dead scientist?”

“That’s him.”

“Never came in on my shift. What are you reaching for, Mr Thawne?”

“You really want to know?”

He checked the room again. Nobody needed a drink.

“Sure. You’ve been asking questions all day. When the cops do it, they have to tell you why.”

“This guy Allen… I heard a story he came here to talk to somebody about Hartley Rathaway.”

“I don’t know who that is either.”

“I thought everybody in this city knew that name.”

“I’m from Starling.”

“Then I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said.

One of the women leaned past me. Not too close, since I seemed to be a lot more interested in the well-dressed barman. Sam shook up three more luminescent drinks for the party. One of them raised her glass in salute. I wondered what chartreuse tasted like. Then he went to defile a few more Martinis for the suits. I listened to the background music. A woman singing an old Britney song the way Marylin Munroe said happy birthday to the President.

Sam came back. “I’ve got a question,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“If you showed Mrs Allen the pictures of her husband with his girlfriend, why has she got you working so hard to dig him out of this hole?”

“I didn’t ask,” I said. “Maybe she figures it’ll be tough serving divorce papers through the bars of a cell.”

“Or maybe she’s got a guy of her own somewhere. Did you ever think of that?”

I hadn’t. It had never crossed my mind. I said, “If Allen gets out of this then he can hire me to look into it. Until then, I’m doing this job.”

I pulled a twenty out of my pocket and put it down on the bar. Sam looked at it like it was Monopoly money.

“Your tip’s too generous, Mr Thawne,” Sam said. “That’s no good here.”

I picked the cash up and let him see me put it away. 

“I guess that’s the easy way,” I said.

“Is there a hard way?”

“Not from me. But I know the guy in charge of the case that Allen’s tied up in. He’s an asshole. If he decides to charge Allen, he’ll want all his angles covered. He’ll track every step Allen’s taken for days. He’ll want statements from everybody who came within twenty feet of him. So he’ll come here, he’ll take your cameras apart, he’ll subpoena last night’s card statements and run down every single one of your customers for their life story in triplicate. That’ll make a lot of people think twice about coming back here again.”

“Is that a threat, Mr Thawne?”

“Call it a prophecy,” I said. “Unless I can get ahead of him and prove Allen doesn’t have anything he wants. So one last time, is there anything you can do to help me?”

Sam poured himself a soda. He drank it like he wished it was stronger.

“All I can do is wish you good luck.”

I straightened up and checked the angles again. “What about Lisa Snart? What will I get from her?”

Saying his boss’ last name out loud made an impression, but it wasn’t the one I was hoping for. “Where do you think this is coming from, Mr Thawne?” he asked.

“I’d like to hear that from her.”

“I’m sure you would, Mr Thawne. But that’s not going to happen.”

“How about you send her a drink from me?”

“I’m sorry, Mr Thawne. I’m going to start exercising my right to refuse service to anybody.”

“Suppose I don’t want to leave.”

“Well, that’s between you and Tony,” he said.

His smile told a joke. I turned around and saw the punchline. I had to look up to do it. I got off the bar stool and was still looking up. The guy in front of me must have come from my town. He looked like seven feet of Keystone I-beam rolled out of the plant and into a shirt and tie. Whoever had cut the suit hadn’t thought hard enough about the flanges he used for shoulders. They looked like they were going to burst out of his jacket at any moment. I might have been older, and I was probably wiser, but those didn’t feel like advantages right now.

“Tony, this is Eddie Thawne,” Sam said. “He says he’s not a cop.”

“That’s good,” Tony said. “I don’t like cops.”

He liked me enough to let me put my jacket on, then a hand like a bear trap closed around my arm. I went with him because my masculinity probably couldn’t have survived being dragged past the ladies. He didn’t let up when we reached the sidewalk. I wondered if I’d ever feel my right hand again.

“So, Tony,” I said. “They give you those steroids on your HMO or did you have to go private?”

He grinned. I waited for him to hit me. I’d left my Glock in the car, but had a backup strapped around my ankle. Right now, it might as well have been strapped to the far side of Mars.

Tony didn’t hit me. Maybe because he liked me. Maybe because he didn’t want to waste the time going to find my head after he knocked it off. Instead, he just raised his arm. There was a bulge under the jacket that wasn’t his abs. Even straining the fabric like that, he could probably have hidden a howitzer under there. I started to re-think my gun plan, not only because he’d probably just have eaten anything that wasn’t big enough to sink the USS _Missouri_.  

“My car’s that way,” I said, pointing with the arm I had spare.

“That’s nice,” Tony said.

We went the other way. Around the corner was a Chrysler whose parking spot would need its own zip code. It was the kind of car you only got if you had somebody else to drive it for you. My chauffeur for the evening was wearing a charcoal jacket, white shirt and no tie. He opened the back door and Tony loaded me inside. He went around and got in behind the driver. I didn’t waste time trying the brushed metal handle, I had the feeling it wouldn’t open for me. There was enough space for me to lie back and take a nap, but I resisted. If I’d woken up surrounded by this much cream and imitation wood, I might have thought I was in a coffin. I fastened my seatbelt like that wasn’t a real possibility.

The driver took a good look at me in the mirror. He had a Latin tan and high-and-tight hair. A diagonal scar cut his right eyebrow in two and nearly did the same to the eye itself. We swapped threat assessments and then he checked his other passenger.

“Seatbelt, Tony,” he said, and then started the car.

Tony buckled up and sat back. The car rolled out into the street. I didn’t feel the acceleration, but the streetlights started strobing in the tinted window. The speed made it hard to guess the distance between junctions. We flowed around a couple of corners. I wasn’t sure if they were trying to shake a tail or my sense of direction. We found a quiet street and did a long, level straight without putting a toe over the speed limit. The driver had a game: every time we hit a stop-light, he’d turn. But each turn was the opposite way to the last, averaging out at a sweep that my instincts told me was up towards the lake.

I still had my cell phone and my gun. As long as I had those, there was only so much trouble I could get in. The lake was too hard working to be used as waste disposal for criminals on either side of the river, so anybody fished out usually had nobody to blame but themselves. Even ex-cops would bring you too much trouble to be worth messing with. They wouldn’t get blood on the seats of such a nice car. I wasn’t scared, it was just that I’d already died once and it seemed like a lot of work to do it again so soon.

The Chrysler turned a last corner, made a sidestep and went still. The driver got out. He let Tony out and they both came around to open my door. They let me disembark on my own.

We weren’t by the lake, but we couldn’t be far from it. The building on the other side of the street was a single storey of corrugated iron. The roof sloped down over a sign promising enough auto parts to build a car on your own.

We hadn’t come all this way to swap out a fan belt. Tony turned me around to face another warehouse. This one had survived the regeneration of Central City by making a career change. Now the long building had a white and black paintjob at contrasting angles and a lot more scenic windows than it needed. There was a big transparent lobby where the loading dock used to be. The light inside was a dim, chemical yellow. The rosewood-panelled reception desk came fitted with a better office chair than I owned, and presumably an illuminating receptionist during daylight hours. The sign behind it said _HotDesk Office Solutions_.

At the back of the lobby was a set of double doors that the driver unlocked. He locked them again behind us and said, “Raise your arms.”

The best way to teach cops how to do a body search is to practice on each other, so I knew the drill. Arms up shoulder height and take it one limb at a time. If you’ve got a partner, one searches the other watches. Tony did the watching, standing back as the driver went over everything from my watch to shoelaces. Anything loose went into a plastic grocery bag. He checked every card and license in my wallet to make sure the names matched. He didn’t even flinch when he found my ankle holster, he just ejected the magazine, racked the slide to be sure and then dropped the gun into the bag as well. When he was satisfied I didn’t have a machete down my pants, he gave the bag to Tony and led the way up the fire stairs. They weren’t taking any chances in the elevator. Or maybe they needed the exercise.

The second floor of the building was a straight corridor between two rows of miniaturised offices. Each one had a numbered glass door and standardised open-plan seating. The rental fee got you computer monitors, chairs and a plant. Wifi hummed invisibly in the air and we walked past a room full of printers. The people who rented these offices by the day or hour brought their whole businesses in on a USB drive or had it waiting for them on the Cloud. I guess it was better than trying to run a start-up from the Starbucks next to a print shop.

At the end of the corridor, two doors faced each other. These had been pebbled over for privacy.  Tony opened the one on the left and pushed me through.

I stopped at the foot of a polished wood conference table. There were nine high-backed leather chairs around it. Two speaker phones sat like helpful limpets at either end. In the centre was a stocky projector ready to throw a presentation onto the unoccupied wall.

There was a man sitting at the far end of the table. He wore a midnight blue jacket, an azure shirt and a cobalt tie. His smooth skin was faded honey. His hair was a tightly-curled sheen over his scalp. He had full lips that were thinking about a smile. He had his legs almost crossed, his shiny right boot balanced over his left knee, relaxed because he could afford to be. He was Leonard Snart.

He said, “Tony, Jared. Thank you.”

Tony lumbered through the door. Jared looked like he wanted to salute, but just came to attention and marched out. The door closed behind them.

Snart was leaning something on his raised leg. He straightened up and dropped it onto the table where I could see it. It was an iPad, open to my website.

“Hi Eddie,” he said. “You know who I am?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Good. My sister told me about you.”

“I’m not looking for a date,” I said. “And you should know I’ve been given the shovel talk by experts.”

That got me a smile so short I barely saw it. “Sit down, Eddie.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You sure? I hear you’ve got a heart condition.”

“Not as bad as the one they gave Clyde Mardon.”

Another flash of a smile. “You a good cop, Eddie?”

“I know what you think a good cop is, but I’m not dead.”

“Yet.”

“Yet,” I agreed. “But your sister’s got a bar to run and even ex cops are bad for business if they show up dead. You know where my office is, you could have had me run down stepping off the sidewalk. Just another tragic accident. You brought me here to talk, so let’s talk.”

I pulled out a chair and sat down.

“What shall we talk about, Eddie?” Snart asked.

“A guy called Barry Allen. He’s a CSI with CCPD. Last night he went to your club with a friend to meet somebody. They didn’t show. Then he went to STAR Labs, near enough to the time somebody shot Harrison Wells that the detective running the investigation has him at the top of the suspect list. You probably know most of that already.”

“Do I?”

“Cops talk. Guys like you make sure to hear what they say.”

“Only when it concerns me. This doesn’t.”

“But you probably heard it anyway. You still haven’t started looking worried that Central City’s most wanted was in your club last night.”

“Why should it?”

I only saw the shift because I’d been waiting for it. Snart’s back straightened a few millimetres. His idle foot wasn’t lolling anymore. His eyes froze.

“I told your barman what would happen when the lead detective finds out where Allen was before he was at STAR Labs. I hope he passed it on. Because that’s not all. The guy’s IA, but do you think he’d pass up the chance to take you to Iron Heights as well? This investigation will give him anything he wants. He’ll get enough warrants that you won’t be short of cocktail napkins for a year. If he finds as much as a health code violation and he’ll use it to bring you and your sister in. And even if he can’t do that, how many customers is the club going to get when the city finds out the name of the silent partner? See, I looked up the Nemean Lion. The story goes that its skin was so tough that Hercules couldn’t get a sword through. So he strangled it instead.”

Snart smiled. It was about as honest as a banker’s bonus. “You could be right, Eddie. So why haven’t you reported this like a good little cop?”

“Because I’m not a cop anymore,” I said. “Till they subpoena me, I get to keep my mouth shut.”

“What’s your jaw charging?”

“All I want to know is why Allen was at your club last night.”

“And you thought I’d tell you?”

“No. I was hoping Lisa would. Or at least that she’d listen and nod.”

Snart dropped his foot to the floor. He’d stopped smiling, but that was probably a sign I was doing better.

“So talk,” he said. “Maybe I’ll nod.”

“Alright. I think Barry Allen came to your club because it’s the last place in Central City he’d ever see another cop. He wanted the privacy because he’d started digging into the disappearance of Hartley Rathaway off the books.”

“Naughty boy,” Snart said.

“Runs in the family,” I said. “He’d been working at STAR Labs, the same place as Rathaway, and he’d found something. He was going to meet somebody at your club to talk about it. I think he was going to meet Doctor Wells, and he wanted to do it somewhere neither of them would be recognised.”

“Why would he care?”

“I don’t know. That depends on what he found. But it must have been something big. I figure he arranges the meeting, but then his friend insists she’s coming along. Doctor Wells is her boss, but she doesn’t know that’s who Allen plans to meet. So either he calls Wells and cancels, then acts like his contact is a no-show, or he goes along anyway and Wells doesn’t show up for reasons of his own. Either way, his friend goes home and Allen goes to STAR Labs to meet Wells there. Only Wells is dead, so he panics, leaves, and gets seen on the way out.”

“It’s a theory.”

“It is. Sam tell you anything I can use to back it up?”

“Don’t know,” Snart said. “Barry and Sam talked about the Darbinyan family.”

“The Darbinyans?”

“Sure. They still required reading for cops in this town? I know I am.”

I thought back. It’s funny how the days of sitting in an office reading old reports never makes it into the cops shows.

“They’re a history lesson,” I said. “The family used to run half the crime in Keystone and Central. They lost their grip when the redevelopments started. Mayor Bellows declared war on them as soon as he was sure they wouldn’t fight back. Some of them made it up to Starling and the Feds took the rest.”

Snart waited, probably to see if I was going to add anything that I shouldn’t. Then his eyes went a little distant. This was history to me. For him it was biography.

“Barry wanted to know if that was true,” he said. “He thought some of them might have stuck around.”

“Why?”

“Me. He heard I worked for them.”

“Did you?”

He gave me the look of an offended professional. “No. I paid a due if I had to. So did everybody else. They were too big for me. Too many leaks. They found that out the hard way.”

“And that’s what Sam told Barry?”

“Yeah. Like you said, they’re a history lesson.”

“What about the second time Barry came to the bar?”

“He asked if Sam knew any of them up in Starling. He doesn’t.”

“You sound pretty sure.”

“Lisa does the hiring. She checks résumés very carefully.” 

“Did Sam tell you what this had to do with Hartley Rathaway?”

“Don’t know, Eddie. That’s your theory, not mine.”

“Care to take a guess?”

“Sorry. You want a fortune cookie, try the place by your apartment.”

“Then I guess we’re done,” I said. “If you’re going to let me walk out of here.”

Snart smiled. He let it linger this time. “Actually, I was going to offer you a ride. Jared will take you back to your car. But if you want another Manhattan, find someplace else.”

“I’ll catch a cab,” I said.

“Have it your own way.”

I got up. Snart stayed in the chair. This wasn’t the kind of meeting that ended with handshakes. It ended with me walking up to Jared and holding out my hand. He gave me the grocery bag and said goodnight. I made sure I had the clip back in my gun by the time I hit the elevator, but nobody tried to stop me going home.


	8. Growin' Up

I slept in the next morning. I made it all the way to eight-ten before my cell phone rang.

“Where are you, Eddie?” Sara Lance asked. “I called your office.”

I thought about lying, then figured if wanted to commit suicide I’d just take Lisa Snart out for drinks. “I just woke up. Had a long day yesterday.”

“Like you’re the only one. It’s called coffee, Thawne.”

“I know, Ms Lance.”

“And call me Sara, alright? I’m not your secretary.”

“Sure.”

First name basis just felt like another knife being sharpened. “So what have you got for me?” Sara asked.

“A theory on why Allen’s not talking.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know if I should say over the phone. I need to check some things with Doctor Morgan first. Can you send me the address?”

“Good luck talking to her. Have you seen the papers? The story’s out that Wells was murdered. Half the reporters in the city are on her front lawn right now looking for a comment.”

Captain Singh’s suspicious death statement yesterday had only bought the investigation twenty-four hours. I guessed they were all hoping for longer, but in a high-profile case like this, they were lucky to get that much. Now Zolomon was going to have to work with a mob of cameras and microphones in his wake. No matter how hungry for recognition you were, that got old fast.

“Do they know about Barry yet?” I asked.

“Nobody’s said anything,” Sara said. “Just a couple of unconfirmed reports about a suspect.”

“That’s something, I guess. What are you doing?”

“Iris just delivered Barry’s home office stuff. One set to me and one to Detective Zolomon. If there’s anything in here, I hope I get to it before he does. How about we meet at the station at noon? Maybe one of us will have found something we can use to pry open Barry by then.”

“Sure,” I said. “Tell Iris to come along too. We might need her.”

“If you say so,” Sara said, then hung up.

With the line clear, I used my phone to check the headlines. Yesterday morning the breaking story had been Doctor Wells’ death. This morning, the attention had increased by an order of magnitude and everybody was asking why he’d died. The orgy of speculative answers had already started. People were blaming academic rivalries, luddites, scorned men and women, his friends and co-workers and employees. There were a few ideas that the investigation was just covering up a suicide for the sake of his family and reputation. And that was before you even got to the comment sections.

I took a hot shower, ate a bowl of sweet oatmeal for breakfast and looked up the number of an acquaintance. Friend wasn’t the right word and neither of us would admit to being colleagues. Given how much information people keep on computers these days, anybody doing an investigative job needs to know his way around an operating system or have access to somebody who does. This one was Iris’ before he was mine. One of his specialities was obtaining private telephone numbers from online databases and trading them to journalists and unscrupulous private detectives.

“Curtis, it’s Eddie Thawne.”

“Eddie, what can I do for you and why couldn’t wait until business hours?” Curtis always did his best to sound happy to hear from customers, even when he wasn’t.

“A number, Curtis. Fast. You ready?”

I heard a scramble for a pencil. “Yep, yep. I’m ready. Go for it.”

“Rathaway. Osgood and Rachel Rathaway.” I got a long pause in response. “You need me to spell that?”

“You serious?” Curtis said. “Wow. You don’t call me for the easy stuff do you? What do you want to talk to them for?”

“It’s a long story. Can you do it?”

Curtis dialled the volume down. “Yeah, I can do it. But people like that change their numbers more often than movie stars. I’ll need some time. And some money.”

“This morning,” I said. “I know you can do it. Or is there some other reason they call you Mr Terrific?”

“Sure, appeal to my ego,” Curtis said. “Just remember you didn’t get this one from me.”

I agreed, hung up and checked my messages. Sara had sent me the Wells’ address. They lived in Brookfield Heights, a grid of pastel, wooden-fronted houses designed by architects who’d taken a nineteen-fifties cliché and built dozens of them on twice the scale. Here and there I passed a block of aspirational condos. The people living in them could stand on their balconies and look into back yards as far as the eye could see, wondering if the grass was greener at street level.

The house wasn’t hard to find. It was on Cardero Street, right where Google promised. It was a pyramid worthy of a suburban pharaoh, growing from long, dark brown front where the priority seemed to be the garage and the drive above all else. I couldn’t see a front door, but I could see a fence starting just where the garage ended and growing around the perimeter. There was a gate at the junction and a door behind that. All this meant that the blockade of journalists and equipment had to make do with jamming the drive so that if Doctor Morgan wanted to get out she’d would have to give a few close-ups to the cameras while resisting the urge to run anybody down. Going by the trucks I passed on the street, most of the distinguished personalities were from the tv stations, doing link segments in the hope of finding some actual news to put in front of them later. Nobody from the nationals seemed to have shown up yet, but they probably had their local affiliates doing the hard work for them. The story was big enough that the channels could split people between STAR Labs and the suburbs and mix and match their results. None of them looked like they planned to leave any time soon.

I parked the car a block away from the circus and thought about my next move. While I was thinking, my phone pinged. It was a text from Curtis. The Rathaways’ number and the price tag. He was always willing to let me take the merchandise for a test drive.

I checked my signal bars and then tried a call. The phone at the other end rang three times and then somebody picked up. “Rathaway residence.”

It had been a long shot, getting any of the family. A butler was the more likely outcome. This one had an American accent but an intonation that suggested the finest training, including flights to England to watch _Downton Abbey_ in its native time zone.

“Hi,” I said. “Is Mr or Mrs Rathaway available?”

“I’m afraid not. Who shall I say called?”

“Tell them my name’s Eddie Thawne. I’m a private investigator here in Central City. I’d like to talk to them about their son’s disappearance.”

“Would you?” I could hear a little highly trained venom in the voice.

“Yeah. It’s related to the death of Doctor Harrison Wells. I think there might be a connection. Would you tell them that?”

I heard the sound of what I hoped was a note being taken. “I’ll pass on your message.”

“Thank you.” He let me give my cell and office numbers. Another good sign. “I’ll be waiting for their call.”

“Goodbye, Mr Thawne,” he said, in a tone which suggested I might be waiting a while, and then he hung up.

I stayed in the car for a few minutes, wondering if I’d just watched a lead sink without a trace. If I had, there was nothing I could do but come up with a better plan later. For the moment, I had to get back on the clock.

I got out of the car and walked down the street. None of the journalists looked at me for longer than it took to mistake me for a passing local. I slowed down to count networks, trying to look like I wasn’t. They’d have been suspicious if I hadn’t. Then I went around the corner and headed down the next street, following the line of the big brown fence. The suburban barricade went all the way around the edge of the property, taking up half the next block with nothing visible through it and not much over the top but a couple of trees. The yard could be full of lions, tigers and bears and the neighbours would never know.

I didn’t think Doctor Morgan or Sara Lance would thank me for running the reporter gauntlet to get to the front door. So having established there was no other way inside, I hung out of sight, leant against a nearby hedge and waited. It took twenty minutes of the over-curious neighbour routine before I got a chance. The gate in the fence opened and out walked a dark-haired man whose most distinguishing feature was a blue suit that he seemed to let do the talking for him. The choir of journalists started their usual hymn, supplicants praying for a blessing, but he walked through them like they weren’t there, repeating the ‘no comment’ liturgy as he went. 

As they followed him to a Mercedes like a driveable fountain pen, I took my chance, slipping forward and grabbing the gate before it swung closed. I took two even steps through it and closed it behind me. There was a glass-fronted door ahead which I rapped on, scuffling my feet on the welcome mat to count the seconds. Doctor Morgan appeared on the other side of the barrier and stared at me with narrow-eyed recognition.

I said, “Please could you let me in, Doctor Morgan? Before they see me.”

That was enough. She turned a heavy deadbolt and opened the door for just long enough for me to step through. The door made the sound of a compressed cushion as it shut behind me. As soon as it did, the noise from the service outside went away, leaving us alone in the world.

I held out my hand for a needless introduction. “Eddie Thawne, doctor. We met yesterday.”

“Yes, I remember,” she said, shaking my hand for lack of any better ideas. “Come in please.”

It was hard to think what else to say, since I was already inside. She led me further. The front door opened onto the house’s main intersection. The door to the garage ahead, a flight of stairs leading to the bedrooms to my left and then, at an angle, the entrance to the den and kitchen at the back of the house. I hadn’t earned a couch so she put me on a stool in the kitchen next to a stone-topped bar so I could admire the white cabinets concealing the uneven washer and dryer, and count the minutes on a cooker that looked like it came straight from STAR Labs R&D.

The pot beneath the percolator was still half-full of coffee, so she could offer me some without any extra effort. I accepted and bathed in the aroma for a few minutes while she poured herself some fruit juice. She might have been trying to cut down after spending yesterday on a caffeine drip.

“What can I do for you, Mr Thawne?” she asked.

“I was wondering if I could talk to you,” I said. “Ask a couple of questions, if you don’t mind?”

She scraped over another stool and sat down. “Go ahead. I should probably warn you that unless you’re very original, I’ve probably heard them already. Still… at least that means I’ll know the answers.”

“Thanks,” I said, and figured I’d start with an easy one. “Who was that man who left as I came in?”

“Your distraction? Oh, was Greg. Our attorney. There’s… there’s a lot to do. The house, the car, STAR Labs, the trusts, the bank accounts. Thank God Harrison was so organised or…”

Another thought she couldn’t bring herself to finish. After a while she found one that she could. “They say you could keep busy, don’t they Mr Thawne?”

“Yes, they do,” I said. “But they say a lot of things.”

She read a story there that I hadn’t meant to tell. She didn’t say anything. She drank her juice slowly. I pulled at my coffee, feeling a little bad for liking it so much. If she’d given this to the cops it was no wonder they’d kept finding more questions to ask.

“Are you still working for Barry Allen’s lawyer, Mr Thawne?” Doctor Morgan asked.

“I am,” I said. “She’s convinced this is just a misunderstanding.”

“That isn’t what Detective Zolomon thinks.”

“Oh? What does he think?”

“I don’t think I should tell you, Mr Thawne.”

I wasn’t getting around that, so I said, “You should call me Eddie, Doctor Morgan.”

“Then you should call me Tess, Eddie.”

“Tess…” I said, trying it out while I made a game plan. “Is your daughter home?”

“Yes, she’s upstairs,” Doctor Morgan said, maternal instinct clipping her words.

“Could I talk to her? Just for a couple of minutes?”

“You can never just ask a question once, can you?” she said harshly. Then she pressed a hand to her head and drained the last of her juice. “I’ll see if she’ll speak to you.”

That left the outcome in a lot of doubt. Doctor Morgan walked into the den and called, “Jesse! Jesse! Could you come down? There’s someone who’d like to talk to you.”

We waited. Ten seconds passed. Doctor Morgan was opening her mouth to try again when a door above us slammed open then slammed shut, cutting off a few phrases of Beyoncé. There were heavy footsteps on the stairs, a lot heavier than they needed to be.

Jesse Wells had her mother’s sea-blue eyes. Her hair was a shade of brown somewhere equidistant between her parents, but the loose ringlets were definitely her own. As was her mouth, which was very full and could easy catch and hold the attention of most boys her own age with just a smile. With a couple more years of practice, her pout wouldn’t have taken any prisoners, but she one she gave me and her mother was just anger seeking a target. She wore no makeup and her clothes were one step above pyjamas, enough layers for decency but not enough to be seen by anyone whose opinion she cared about. We obviously weren’t on that list.

She looked at her mother for a few seconds and then at me. “Who are you?” she said.

There was no right answer to that question. Her mom tried anyway. “Jesse, this is Mr Thawne.”

“Cop or doctor?” Jesse said.

I risked a sentence or two. “I’m a private investigator. I work for Barry Allen’s lawyer.”

I was ready for nearly anything. I got nothing. “Okay,” she said. “Mom, can you give us a minute?”

Jesse Wells was an adult. She was in control of her emotions. Her eyes weren’t shot with grief. She hadn’t been sobbing in her room before her mother called her down.

We sat at either end of the wine-coloured leather couch opposite the monolithic tv. I got my notebook out and put it on my knee. She watched the empty black screen in front of her.

“Tell me about your dad,” I said.

She took a second to get going, bracing herself for the past tense. Then she said, “He was really smart. Like, one of the smartest men on the planet. He had this vision for how you could run a lab and if STAR Labs ever needed anything, he made sure they got it. And he did so much for Central City. Most of his patent money went to charity.”

“Jesse,” I said, and the soundbites cut off. “That’s Doctor Harrison Wells you’re talking about. I guess I’ve heard enough about him since yesterday. Tell me about your dad.”

She looked away from her darkened reflection and at me instead. Her hands curled into fists in her lap, pulling at the fabric of her pants. She breathed in the rhythm of the kitchen clock. She blinked down hard on the pools in her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry.

“He was busy,” she said. “A lot. When I was little he’d always be dressed when I came down to breakfast. He’d drive me to school and then go on to the labs. I’d talk to him as much as I could in the car because that was the only chance I got. He wouldn’t come home till late. Sometimes he’d be away for days on business and mom would drive me in and pick me up. Then when I got older he said I should take the bus and didn’t drive me anymore. He’d still talk to me but it was like I was just something on a checklist. Come home, check. Eat dinner, check. Ask Jesse about her day… check.”

She came back a little. Her eyes focussed. She waited for me to tell her that was terrible, that she shouldn’t say that about her father. I didn’t, and I guess she could see I wasn’t going to. So she kept talking.

“He only started really taking an interest when I started going out with friends. He always had to know _exactly_ where I was and _exactly_ who was there with me and _exactly_ how I was getting home. They were just parties, it wasn’t like I was flying to the moon.”

The echo of an old argument. Just enough to give her a little smile.

“But if I ever needed anything, and I could find him, I always got his full attention. When mom went away for her conferences he’d bring like half the lab home with him just so I knew he was upstairs. And when I learned how to drive, he found this guy to teach me who used to drive race cars before he came to STAR Labs to work on engines. I still freaked him out, though.”

We shared a fragile laugh. It left her smile brighter.

“He introduced me to all these cool people. Like the President. And Professor Hawking. And Buzz Aldrin.” There were a lot more names, I could tell. She was shortlisting the ones I’d recognise. “He’d always bring me over and say ‘this is my daughter, Jesse’ and tell them how smart I was.”

She ran out of words. Joy hit grief head on and shook her from head to toe. Then she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, like it was nothing and said, “That’s what my dad was like, Mr Thawne.”

She was holding on by her fingernails, but her eyes still challenged me. Whatever I had, she could take it.

I pulled a question out of the air. “Do you have a boyfriend, Jesse?”

“No.”

“Ever had one?”

“I’ve dated,” she said, like I was accusing her of something. “But it’s tough finding guys to talk to. Either they’re freaked out by how smart I am or they just want to hear about all the stuff my dad… did.”

“Did you ever talk to Barry Allen much?”

The look she gave me told me she knew exactly what I was doing, but didn’t care. “Yeah, I did. Dad introduced us. I… didn’t freak him out.” Her voice dropped, out of embarrassment or sadness. “He was cute, I guess.”

“So you knew him pretty well?”

“We hung out at some lab parties. Nothing… weird, if that’s what you’re thinking. The only time I saw him outside was when he was here on Saturday.”

“Here?” I repeated.

“Yeah,” she said. “He came over Saturday morning. But dad wasn’t home. He was at this symposium in Washington.”

I risked showing my ignorance. “So… Barry came here, this last weekend, to see your dad?”

She gave me a slow nod. “Barry said he and dad were going to talk about another CSI placement at STAR Labs. When I told him dad was in Washington he said he’d gotten the day wrong. Dad didn’t get back till Wednesday morning. That’s how I knew he’d be at the lab so late.”

“Did you tell your dad about Barry visiting?”

“No. I… guess I forgot or I just figured it didn’t matter. Did it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and then changed the subject to pull her way from the fear in her eyes. “So why’d you go to STAR Labs on Wednesday night?”

She’d been down this road before, probably half a dozen times by now. Cops have to take people back to the worst moments in their life, and then do it again and again.

“The college library closed,” she said. “I thought I could get a ride home and maybe he’d tell me what he was doing in Washington. I got to the lab and I saw Barry coming out of one of the side entrances. He walked along the railing by the river and for a second I thought he was waving to me, but he was facing the other way. I don’t think he saw me so I just went in and…”

“That’s okay,” I said. “You’re sure it was him?”

“He walked under one of the lights,” she said softly. “I didn’t… really see his face clearly but how many other guys are that skinny?” Her breaths slowed, coming closer to sobs. “Do you think he hurt my dad?”

“I don’t know,” I said, matching her whisper for whisper. “Do you know any reason he’d want to?”

“No,” she breathed.

“Do you know anyone else who might?”

Shaking her head set her trembling again. “I don’t know.”

My conscience finally overtook the investigator. “Okay, Jesse, that’s all I wanted to ask you. But can I talk to you again if I have any more questions?”

“Sure,” she said.

She got up off the couch and walked out without saying goodbye. The steps on the stairs were heavy but she kept them even. Her bedroom door opened and closed like it was any other day. I listened carefully, but heard nothing but music. A whisper of Adele to drown out her tears.


	9. Darkness on the Edge of Town

Doctor Morgan was waiting for me in the kitchen. Privacy had been limited to sitting quietly within easy earshot, but then the illusion was probably for Jesse’s sake. I hadn’t expected her to leave me alone with her grieving daughter.

I sat down in front of my coffee. I hadn’t brought it with me and it had fallen to room temperature. I drank it anyway. Doctor Morgan seemed a little surprised, but it was good coffee and I’d drank much worse under much worse circumstances.

“You handled that well,” she said.

When you’re a cop you take a lot from other people. Some of it good, a lot of it bad. You don’t give anything back. But when you go private, the rules change. You don’t have a badge, just good will and your own gut to tell you what you need to do to get the job done. It was all public record anyway.

I said, “When I was eighteen, my dad died. He was a city councilman in Keystone. He’d had a mild heart attack the year before. The doctors said too much stress. But he’d worked for the city his whole life and he said he had a lot to finish. So he went back to the office. The cleaners found him in the morning a couple of weeks later. He’d stayed late, had another heart attack. Died at his desk.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Doctor Morgan said.

I got out half a smile. “For a while I was half way between missing him and wanting to yell at him for leaving me and my mom. But I got over it.”

“The police have recommended a counsellor. For both of us.”

“They help,” I said.

“I know.”

“Have you talked to one before?”

Off guard, she didn’t know where to look.

“Tess… Doctor Morgan,” I said, being formal since I was asking a formal question. “I’m sorry to ask this, but were either you or your husband ever unfaithful?"

A shiver went through her. She let out an empty laugh like an echo of a private joke.

“Mr Thawne, I wasn’t the love of my husband’s life. Neither was Jesse. He was completely, unquestionably devoted to STAR Labs from the day he had the idea to the day he died. The fact that Harrison found a way to fit a wife and daughter around that dream tells me everything I will ever need to know about how much he loved us. He simply wouldn’t have the time or space for another person.”

“But that can’t have been easy, can it?”

“I won’t pretend it was, Mr Thawne,” she said. Her tone had changed. The edge was gone and I could hear the patient kindness of a teacher. “You heard what Jesse thought about it. Harrison was never going to be a perfect father. But I knew what I was getting when I married him. Just like he knew what he was getting from me. So I never felt so neglected that I needed comfort from another man. I had my own work. Harrison never complained if I put it before him. And if he was out all night, I always knew exactly where he was and I never doubted he’d… he’d come home.”

After a day the shock had worn off. But grief was still waiting in the corners of her mind. It saw its chance and took it. I left her as alone as I could, looking for a napkin while she cried and then waiting for her to wipe her eyes like I hadn’t seen anything.

“Doesn’t sound like you needed a counsellor,” I said.

“Where do you think I learned that?” Doctor Morgan asked. “A few years after Jesse was born, Harrison and I had… a low point. We were trying to balance our careers, our lives and being parents and… we weren’t succeeding. So, like good scientists, we consulted an expert.”

I smiled along to the weak joke. I hoped she couldn’t see the math I was doing in my head. I said, “I guess the Rathaway case didn’t help.”

“Hartley?” she said.

“That was around the time Hartley Rathaway disappeared wasn’t it? I heard he worked at STAR Labs with your husband. It must have been hard, him vanishing like that. And the police investigation.”

“Harrison would have welcomed an investigation,” she said. “He was the one who reported Hartley missing. Didn’t you know that?”

I went with honesty. “I’ve heard about the case, but I never worked it myself.”

“There was no investigation. Hartley’s parents saw to that. They were convinced he’d just run away and he’d come back eventually. We had a lot of questions from journalists, but I suppose you know how few resources go into looking for a healthy young man old enough to vote.”

“Not a lot,” I admitted. “I guess by the time they figured he wasn’t coming back, the trail had gone cold.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he ran away, Tess?”

 She sighed, long and slow, finding her way back to an older pain which had never quite scarred over. “I don’t know, but I hope he did.”

The sad honesty left me reaching. “You do?”

Her voice got harder. “Of course I do. If he ran away, left Central City and never wanted to look back, then he was okay. But if he didn’t… then something must have happened to him.”

I couldn’t answer that.

“Perhaps he woke up one morning and wanted something… else,” she said. “Hartley wasn’t an easy person to get along with. He thought intelligence was the most important thing in the world and… it was like he was testing everyone around him to see how smart they were. That isn’t a great way to make friends. A lot of people thought he was showing off, especially with all those languages he spoke. He’d do things like start debates and then insist on holding them in French or Latin.”

“Did you think he was showing off?”

“I think… it was more complicated than that. One of his dreams for STAR Labs was that it would be an intellectual meritocracy where position was determined solely by intelligence. Harrison had to explain that it’s a great theory but science in the real world needs more than just pure brains. I don’t know if Hartley ever understood that. But I don’t think he really cared about how smart other people were. I think he was constantly trying to prove how smart he was.”

“To whom?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just to himself.”

“What about your husband?”

Her smile flickered back. “Hartley absolutely worshipped Harrison. He was convinced that Harrison and STAR Labs could change the world and that he’d be a part of it. Hartley wanted to be the best, so of course he wanted to learn everything he could from Harrison. He’d do whatever it took to please him. Harrison always had such a hard time delegating, but if he wanted to spend time with me and Jesse, he’d just tell Hartley what needed to be done and Hartley would make sure it was. I told him once that this made him Jesse’s unofficial uncle. He said he’d think about it.”

“Did you know Hartley’s family?”

She had to think about that for a while. “I don’t think he ever talked to me about them. Of course, everybody knew who they were, but whenever we asked Hartley, he’d change the subject. I suppose he got enough of that while he was growing up. The Rathaways might have made some donations to the labs, but they never came to any of the fundraisers. I’ve never met them.”

“Did Harrison?”

“Just once that I remember. He went to see them after Hartley left, to ask if they knew what happened. He was more concerned than they were. I think. But this was all a very long time ago. Even though there’s always someone who wants to go over it, there are probably things I’ve forgotten.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m sorry, I was just curious.”

“I understand. That’s why the police and the journalists keep asking. Perhaps one day one of them will finally find an answer.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure you’re just curious, Eddie?” she asked.

“It might be more than that,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything in your husband’s past that might have come back.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

I thought she did, but if she wanted me to say it, then I’d say it. “I guess it’s hard to remember when Harrison Wells wasn’t one of the most important men in Central City. But when he first came here to start the labs, he had a lot of grants, but not a lot of influence. He had to make friends. But this town wasn’t always as nice as it is now. It’s possible that he might have had to do business with some local… organisations just to get the project going.”

Her face went white and then red. She had to gulp a breath to get herself back to pink. “No,” she said, forming the word very carefully. “Harrison would never do that.”

“Tess, the kind of people I’m talking about… they do business with you whether you want it or not.”

Her breathing evened out. “I remember stories about that in the newspapers. One family in particular…”

“The Darbinyans.”

“Yes,” she said, silently asking why I knew the name so easily. “They were just news stories to us. If Harrison was ever approached… I don’t know what he’d have done about it. But I’m sure he would have told me.”

“And he never mentioned about any threats? Even subtle ones? No weird calls or letters in the mail? Not just from the Darbinyans.”

The colour flared again, but she caught it faster this time. “As you said, Harrison was one of the most influential men in the city. He didn’t get there by bowing to pressure. Neither did I. We don’t scare easily, but we aren’t stupid. We never had any contact with these local thugs, and we would have gone to the police if either of us had been threatened by more than a few online trolls.”

“I’ll check with them,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. She shrank a little and had to prop herself up on her hands. “You understand, don’t you? There are already people asking what Harrison did to deserve what happened to him. He never cared about his reputation, but… it’s all that’s left of him now.”

“Not all.”

She titled her chin up, and I saw the glimmering of what would have been a smile on another day. “Thank you, Eddie.”

“Thank you, Tess. I should probably go, if I can get out of here without giving a press conference.”

Something sparkled in Tess’ eyes, something from before she’d been a wife, a mother and a doctor. She said, “I have a teenage daughter, Eddie. I know a couple of ways to get out of the house without using the front door.”

We went into the back yard. I’d been half-expecting a pool, but there was just a wide, flat lawn, divided in half by a trail of artistically irregular flagstones leading to the raised decking against the back fence. The deck supported a couple of wooden chairs, some of them for lounging and some upright. It looked like a yard for hanging out rather than growing anything more complicated than grass and a few stylised bushes. I guess the advanced physics and mathematics didn’t leave any time for amateur botany.

Tess led me to the deck and dragged one of the chairs up to the fence. I got the idea pretty fast. A girl Jesse’s height probably needed some nerve and a few gymnastics lessons, but it was easy for me to stand on the chair and get a foot in between the fence posts.

“Thanks for your time, Doctor Morgan,” I said, trying not to think what Joe or Sara would say if they could see me now.

“Come by anytime,” she replied. “But bring your own stepladder.” 

“Next time I’ll come on stilts,” I said, and jumped.

The fall didn’t do me any harm, and I don’t think anybody saw me. I straightened up, checked I hadn’t caught anything important on the fence, and went back to my car.

* * *

There was a reporter doing the classic walk and talk to camera act outside the CCPD building when I arrived. As it was past twelve and he looked like the only one around. He was probably at the back of the line, dreaming of the days when he’d be the one in the luxury studio chair, turning to the home audience when the location piece was over and saying “Thanks, Greg. Now in other news…”

The people on the sidewalk passed him like he wasn’t there. I did the same. He and his crew paid no attention to me going into the station. I was hoping for the same professional disinterest as yesterday. This time, the front desk put up a fight and made me wait ten minutes until Detective Spivot could come down to babysit.

Patty was still wearing yesterday’s grey. It was starting to match her washed out skin and the shade around her eyes. She blinked slowly. Getting her eyes open again looked like it took a lot of effort.

“Hey, Eddie,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. It seemed like the safest option.

“I can’t remember how long I’ve been awake,” she said. “There was a gas station robbery last night. And because I’m one of the only detectives without something to do on the Wells case I got the call. Crime never sleeps… and neither do I.”

“Right.”

“Don’t worry, the perps are downstairs being booked in now,” she went on. “I don’t know why they thought we wouldn’t check their mom’s house.”

“Good job,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “So what’s new with you? Did you figure out what’s going on with Barry yet?”

“I’m working on it. Is Sara Lance here?”

“Oh… yeah. She and Iris are in the conference room. This way.”

“Thanks. Have you seen Zolomon?”

“Umm… no. No, I haven’t.”

“Do you know where he is?”

On our way to the conference room, we’d gotten too close to Captain Singh’s office. I should have expected the door to open.

“Detective Spivot!” Singh called. “Why are you still here? I don’t need the press seeing my officers looking like the walking dead.”

“Yes, captain! I was just showing Eddie – ”

“He knows the way, detective. Go home. Go to bed.”

Point made, the door slammed closed. One of the desk officers waited till he was sure it wasn’t going to open again and then let out a giggle.

“So I guess I’ll see you, Eddie,” Patty said.

“Good call,” I said.

I went up to the conference room. Iris and Sara were sitting on either side of the table at the far end. There were two piles of multi-coloured folders next to them. As I came in, Sara carefully put a stapled stack of paper back into the red folder in front of her and added it to the taller pile.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Faster than I thought,” Sara said. “Nothing unaccounted for, nothing out of place. If I gave out awards for well organised paperwork he’d probably win one. And I don’t mind telling you it’s kinda freaking me out.”

“Everybody always expects Barry to be a mess,” Iris said.

“So there’s nothing that shouldn’t be there?”

“No,” Sara said. “You expecting something?”

I looked at Iris instead. “Does Barry ever work cold cases?”

Iris looked at me, then at Sara. Sara gave her a lazy wave of permission. I guess I’d earned that much benefit of the doubt.

“Yes, he does. Umm… last month he helped run a batch of hand-drawn suspect sketches from a ten year old robbery through the facial recognition software. They got a hit.”

“What about unofficially?”

She’d been hoping I’d take her first answer. She went still and silent when I didn’t.

“What do you mean?”

“Iris, I think Barry’s been working a case off the clock. God knows he wouldn’t be the first. I think he was digging into Hartley Rathaway’s disappearance.”

“Rathaway?” she repeated.

“Yeah. Barry’s time at STAR Labs got him curious. I think he found something and he was going to talk to Wells about it, but somebody got to Wells first. I think Barry saw something and that’s what he’s keeping quiet about.”

Sara gave me a long, cool look. “Is this what you couldn’t tell me on the phone? An ancient missing persons case that everybody already knows about?”

After just over a day, I was lucky I even had a theory to sell, even if it did sound crazy. “Barry’s a scientist and close enough to a cop. He’d only stay quiet about this to protect somebody.”

“You think he’s being threatened?” Sara asked.

“Him, or Iris,” I said.

“He wouldn’t do that,” Iris said.

I sat down opposite her. “Are you sure? You know what you’d do for him. What makes you think he wouldn’t do the same for you?”

Sara brought her palm down on the table hard enough to make me, Iris and the paperwork jump. “This is why I don’t do office romances. So what you’re saying is that Barry’s a witness to a murder, and he’s holding back somebody’s threatening him or his family?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” she said. “I can work with that. Of course that might just put him in protective custody instead. Just make sure nobody hears the Rathaway theory or we’ll be pleading his case from the psych ward.”

Iris leaned across the table as Sara sat back, pretending she couldn’t see or hear. Ms West of CCPN asked me, “Who do you think is threatening Barry?”

I tried to convince myself that I just didn’t want her chasing wild geese and it had nothing to do with how dangerous the Darbinyan family had once been, and said, “I don’t know. I guess that depends on what he thought he found.”

The door rattled. Zolomon hadn’t bothered to knock this time. He looked at everyone around the table like he was waiting for one of us to run. “Ms Lance, I’m going to see your client.”

“Detective Zolomon,” Sara said. “I was just coming to find you.”

“Then I saved you the walk.”

Iris didn’t have the same patience. She was the first to her feet. Zolomon shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mrs West-Allen. This is official. You should probably stay here.”

Iris sat down again, like it had been her idea. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

“Can I bring my investigator?” Sara asked.

“Alright,” Zolomon said. “If you think it’ll help.”

I didn’t say anything. I helped Sara collect the folders and gave Iris a long silent apology as we shut the door on her.

“Find anything yet, Eddie?”

“Something,” I said.

“That’s good,” Zolomon said. “But you’ll understand if I want to go first, since I’m the one who still has the badge.”

“Knock yourself out,” Sara said.

She would gladly have helped him. A few of her jurisprudence guides looked heavy enough to cause some nice blunt force trauma.

Zolomon had the audience all ready for his performance. He sat Barry against the back wall with Sara on his left hand and me in the ringside corner, and then introduced himself to the suspect and the recording equipment. Then he took a sleek, shiny revolver, gift-wrapped by the forensic team, out of his case and laid it on the table.

When none of us clapped, he said, “Do you recognise this, Barry? It’s the gun registered to Harrison Wells. The marine unit pulled it out of the river. It’s been test-fired. This is the gun that killed him.”

“Any fingerprints on it?” Sara asked.

“No,” Zolomon said.

“Is that all?”

“No.” His voice snapped a little; he didn’t like being rushed. “Barry, I’m sorry to tell you this, but your friend Doctor Snow called while Julian was running the tests. She wanted to make a statement. She apologised for taking so long, but she made up for it. She told me that the two of you went out for drinks on Wednesday night after work.”

“Where?” I asked.

Zolomon raised his eyes, wondering why we couldn’t both be as quiet as Allen. “The Dining Car. On Granville Street.”

“I think I know it,” I said.

It was a good place for a date. Big and generic enough to pull in a crowd most nights, and two blocks down from the Nemean Club.

Zolomon said, “Doctor Snow told me that you two had some drinks and then she went home. Probably about half past nine. She told me you’d done this once or twice a week since before Christmas.” His smile sharpened to a razor. “And I know that you went to Doctor Wells’ house last weekend, but he wasn’t there. So you knew he’d be back at STAR Labs on Wednesday.”

He took a moment to pause, do some breathing and sip some water. Then he turned the smile on me and Sara. “Oh, and in case you were wondering, Doctor Arthur Light was working a night shift on Wednesday. At Gotham General. And the whole of the Pittsburgh PD can vouch for Edward Raymond. They picked him up outside the bar where he’d been celebrating his son’s birthday and took him in to sleep it off. I haven’t got an alibi for General Eiling yet, but I don’t think his office would be stonewalling so hard if he was anywhere as boring as Central City.”

I looked at Allen. Zolomon had torpedoed three of our suspects and it could have been a weather report for all the difference it made to the fourth.

“So here’s what I think,” Zolomon said. “Doctor Snow works at STAR Labs. Wells even introduced you. And then he hears how much time the two of you have been spending together, and he assumes the worst. Now, I don’t care if you were sleeping together or not, but that’s what Wells thought. And should a guy really be spending so much time with another woman when he has a wife at home? You’re the expert, Eddie, what do you think?”

I declined to comment. Allen did the same. He’d already heard this from me and the repeat performance cost it the impact. If Zolomon noticed, he didn’t let that stop him.

“So, because you’re the one who’s married, Wells tells you back off. But you don’t. So he says that if it keeps up, he’ll have to tell your wife. You go around to his house to have it out with him, but he’s away on business. But you know him pretty well, and you know when he’ll be back. Doctor Snow might not have told me everything; maybe the two of you talked about it that night. Either way, you go around to Wells’ office at STAR Labs and the two of you argue.” Zolomon leaned forward, as close to Allen as he could, watching, waiting. “You argue and it gets out of control. Somebody pulls Wells’ revolver. There’s a struggle and the gun goes off.”

Zolomon paused, took a deep breath. Sara Lance went for the gap.

“Hold on! There are no fingerprints on the gun. Have you got any evidence that my client was even in Doctor Wells’ office when he died?”

“Your client is a highly trained forensic scientist,” Zolomon said. “I bet he could spend a week in this room and clean it up so we’d never know.”

Sara had to wrap her hand around the table to stop herself doing something else with it. “You cannot seriously be using the absence of evidence as proof of guilt.”

I took a shot of my own. “And how’d he get to STAR Labs? He’d need a cab to get there in time to do all that. You’ve had his picture up for nearly a day. Where’s the driver?”

“You think he ran there, do you?”

“No,” I said. “He took a bus. Which wouldn’t give your theory enough time.”

Zolomon’s smile lost its edge. Now it was friendly, supportive. Pitying.

“You panicked, Barry. I get it. You panicked and you tried to clean up, to make it look like you weren’t there. You took the gun and you threw it in the river and then you went home. You didn’t know his daughter had seen you. Come on, Barry.”

Allen spoke. Soft, calm and firm he said, “Yeah.”

I nearly forgot how to stand. Sara went slack, the tension leaving her body for her rising brows. Zolomon leant slowly backwards, swinging into his chair like a pendulum.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Allen said. “That’s what happened.”

“Barry…” Sara said.

Zolomon came forward again. “That’s what happened.”

“Yeah. Doctor Wells said I shouldn’t be spending so much time with Caitlin.”

Sara stayed in her seat, frozen by the choice of which one of them to tackle. “Barry, as your lawyer…”

Allen’s statement rolled over her. “He wasn’t at home on Saturday so I went to his office on Wednesday night, like you said. Caitlin didn’t know.”

I was trapped against the wall, as powerless as a butterfly pinned to a board, waiting for the jar to fill with cyanide.

Sara made one last attempt to break the glass and save us. “Detective, I need a minute alone with my client.”

Allen said, “I went up to his office. We argued. I said he had no right to interfere with my marriage. He said he was just worried about Caitlin. I knew where he kept his revolver. I got it out of the drawer and I told him to stay out of my business. Doctor Wells tried to grab it. And I shot him.”

We all waited. Nobody moved. Only the flickering numbers on the recorder told us that time was still passing.

Zolomon pushed his chair back. He put his hands on the table. Allen looked up at him. There was nothing in his eyes at all.

“Barry Allen, I’m arresting you for the murder of Harrison Wells. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”

It should have been this case’s punchline. Nobody laughed.

“Do you understand the rights I’ve read to you?”

“I do.”


	10. Devils and Dust

“This is crazy,” Iris said. “This is insane. He’s lost his mind. What is he thinking?”

After her husband upturned the world on us, I’d taken Iris home. Not to her own place. Her colleagues were all reporters who’d sense the blood in the water and the story that came with it. Linda was running down a shortstop ahead of the new season. Sara stayed at the station to listen to Allen carving his headstone. Nobody thought Iris should be left alone. So I’d brought her to Joe’s.

He was home, off duty and sinking into his brown leather couch with a beer and a daytime re-run to stop him from thinking. I heard canned laughter before he shut the tv off. That meant he was about as bad as she was.

We sat down at the dinner table. Joe watched Iris find a tumbler and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and then take a slug of it without pausing for breath. He looked back and forth between us, not knowing who to ask. I gave him the play-by-play of Allen’s confession.

The bourbon might have dulled Iris’ shock, but it hadn’t done much else. She stayed on her feet. Then she started walking and talking.

“Barry wouldn’t kill Harrison Wells. He couldn’t. As long as I’ve known him, he’s never wanted to hurt anybody.”

She broke off for long enough to make a sound like an angry blender. In the gap, Joe said, “Then why did he say that he did?”

Iris raised her hands in a plea to the silent, uncaring ceiling. “I don’t know! It doesn’t make any sense! He wasn’t having an affair, daddy, I swear. Tell him, Eddie.”

Joe’s head came around like he’d forgotten I was there. I got his oldest, most parental look, one that said he wanted to know exactly how much there was to this story. I had to remind myself I wasn’t his partner or his prospective son-in-law anymore before I tried to dodge the question.

“Iris, it doesn’t matter if Barry was or not. Wells just had to think that he was.”

“Then Barry would have just told him he was wrong.”

Neither of us tried to argue with the certainty. Iris still didn’t sit. She grabbed the back of a chair and squeezed it hard enough crush the wood into coal.

“What if he’s just doing this because he’s being threatened? Like you thought?”

“You did, did you?” Joe said.

“It’s a theory,” I said, trying not to sound like Allen wasn’t trying his hardest to prove it wrong.

“Then why not ask for protection?” Joe asked. “He could have the whole CCPD if he wanted it. Captain Singh would make sure.”

“I don’t know,” Iris said. “But daddy, we have to find out. I… I just can’t…”

She faded out. She needed somebody to put their arms around her and tell her it was all going to be okay. Somebody who wasn’t me.

Then my cell phone jangled, shattering the moment and giving me the out I’d been praying for.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should take this.”

Joe gave a sweeping dismissal, not looking away from his daughter. I fled across the den and took a nice close look at the inside of the front door as I answered the call.

“Mr Thawne?”

I thought knew the voice, but my head was still with Iris, so I couldn’t place it. I did my best to sound like I could see professional through a telescope from where I was.

“Speaking.”

“I’m calling from Mrs Rachel Rathaway. If you would still like to discuss the matter you called about, she is available this afternoon.”

Not knowing what the BBC-approved response was, I just said, “Sure. When can she see me?”

“Thank you, Mr Thawne. Mrs Rathaway’s car will collect you from your office in an hour.”

“Okay.”

He was gone before I could check I’d heard him right. In his world, people got sent cars often enough they just knew how to handle it.

I went slowly back across the den. Joe had somehow gotten Iris to take a chair. There was a bottle in front of her, but it was only light beer. He’d also produced a plate of her favourite cookies by some act of paternal magic, bringing together the angry wife and the frightened daughter.

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

“Where?” Joe asked. He didn’t sound unhappy I was leaving.

Neither honesty or lies seemed like a good idea. I said, “There’s a lead I want to check out.”

“For Barry?” Iris said.

“Yeah.”

She was trying hard not to turn her frustrations on me. “Then you should go,” she said.

I went. There was nothing else for me to do.

* * *

I had no trouble recognising the car that the Rathaways had sent. It was a battleship grey Mercedes of the kind built in the seventies to transport Third World dictators from atrocity to the next. The glass in the windows probably wasn’t bulletproof, but it looked big and sturdy enough to resist a regime change all on its own. It sat outside my building like a submarine in a swimming pool.

The man who got out was nearly as old as the car. He’d been solid once, but he’d grown a belly spending too much time in the driver’s seat. His monochrome suit did its best to hide the years, but we both knew they were there. A long time ago he’d probably had driving lessons from the Secret Service, shuffling Washington VIPs through the Beltway traffic with a pistol under his arm and a submachine gun in the glove compartment. Now he was waiting for retirement with the city’s oldest names in his back seat. I wonder which way he liked it better.

“Mr Thawne?”

He asked my name like he already knew it. He was probably just making sure the name and face matched the one they’d checked out online. I was glad to hear the trace of the Midwest in his voice. It gave me hope I’d be staying on the same planet.

“I’m David. Mrs Rathaway sent me.”

He let me open my own door. I’m not sure I would have done the same. The hinge creaked venerably. I was very careful closing it. Cars like this were an endangered species. David probably spent a lot of time polishing the interior, but I could feel the age. The wood panelling had scuffs too deep to buff out and the leather seats bore the scars of service to many more distinguished rears than mine.

It certainly wasn’t the kind of car to get you somewhere in a hurry. There was probably a lot of power hidden under that mile-long hood, but David was happy to let it trickle out. Maybe he didn’t trust the brakes. We didn’t get close to bothering the speed limit as we headed west, through the heart of the city and then clear out the other side. It was a great car to sit and watch other people overtake you from. I spent the time reading on my cell phone, finding out what the rest of the world had been doing while I’d been chasing ghosts.

David didn’t speak. It wouldn’t have made any difference to him if the car had been empty. But he watched the roads and sidewalks with more than a motorist’s attention. Old habits are hard to break, and the Mercedes was distinctive, especially to somebody who knew how much the passengers were worth.

The spacious suburbs became more thinly spread until the houses just started looking lonely. Then we left even the new developments behind. The ground rose, and I could see the neck of the lake opening up, a huge piece of blue-grey china glittering in the afternoon sun. We spent ten minutes following its dips and curves down Marine Drive and then turned off between the wall of protective trees to a pillared gateway. David brought the car to a stop and touched something I couldn’t see. The gate opened without a sound. There was no name on it or the pillars. Everybody in Central City knew who lived there.

The trees didn’t make it beyond the white stone wall surrounding the property. We rumbled down the narrow drive and between a set of sentry hedges before stopping in front of a raised ring of flowerbeds which acted as a vehicular marshalling point outside the mansion itself.

I got out, closed the door very carefully behind me, and stared.

I’d seen pictures of the Rathaway mansion before, but they just made it look like a film set. It was just over a hundred years old, built at the dawn of the 20th Century by an ancestral Rathaway who’d pointed his architect at a few English country houses and maybe a Bavarian castle or two and told the poor guy he wanted all of the above. The wings weren’t symmetrical. The western one was a stub that came to an abrupt stop against a line of coniferous trees. The east wing expanded in a series of mismatched gabled blocks, trying to give the feeling of a rambling expansion to something built all at once. The heart of the house rose higher than the wings and welcomed visitors with a doorway recessed beneath a rectangular balcony where a Rathaway could stand and address armies of troops or guests gathered on the drive.

The front door was too big for anybody who didn’t play for the NBA, but that didn’t seem to discourage the slender, fine-boned man who came through it. He wore a pale blue suit and a thin white wig that was probably just to keep his head warm. His eyes were a deep brown that made me think of an owl as he looked at me through a pair of fragile spectacles.

“Hello, Mr Thawne,” he said, and I recognised the voice from the telephone. “Mrs Rathaway is in the library.”

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t have much time to take in the marble entrance hall or guess what lay up the pair of narrow arching staircases. I followed the butler into the abbreviated west wing and the single room that made it up. It was a mahogany room with polished walls and an imitation fireplace that had once been real. The windows were narrow, but there was nothing visible through them but leaves. The ceiling fixtures provided plenty of light to show off the names of the ornamental books in glass-fronted cabinets.

If you really wanted to read, you had to bring something with you. Mrs Rachel Rathaway looked up from her _Wall Street Journal_ as we came in. She was a compact woman, small but still firm and unintimidated by her approach to seventy. She wore a plain white blouse and long black skirt with a chequered blazer. Her auburn hair hung carefully around her face and she took off her pair of full-moon glasses to look at me as the butler handled the introductions.

She shook my hand without rising or saying a word. Then she leant sideways towards a crystal decanter on the table next to her which I’d taken for a piece of decoration. It wasn’t. She poured herself a few fingers of high-quality something and sipped it while waiting to see what I’d do.

When I didn’t do anything, she said, “Sit down, Mr Thawne. Do you want something to drink?”

“Black coffee,” I said.

The butler nodded. He thought it was the right choice. Then he left, closing the door behind him. I couldn’t hear a sound from the rest of the house, or from the garden outside. It was a room to be alone in the world.

There was a chaise lounge behind me. I didn’t know how to sit in one, so I had to guess, leaning against the cylindrical cushion and drawing my legs up to balance my notebook on them.

“Who do you work for, Mr Thawne?” Mrs Rathaway asked.

“I’m sorry, that’s confidential.”

“What if I refused to answer your questions unless you tell me?”

I said, “Then thank you for the coffee, Mrs Rathaway, and I’ll need a ride back to the city.”

She finished her drink and said, “The last time I spoke to a private detective, the whole story ended up in the _Keystone Post_.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“We hired him a year after Hartley disappeared. He assured us he was discrete, but he must have been made a better offer.”

“Then why did you want to talk to me, Mrs Rathaway?”

The door opened and closed. I took my eyes off her just long enough to find the coffee by my elbow. She poured herself another drink, but it was smaller this time.

“For the same reason I’ll still talk to honest journalists if they ask,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever see my son again. When he left, Osgood and I were convinced it was just a phase and he would come back. We resisted making a public statement because we thought he wanted the entire city searching for him. But the story got into all the newspapers and he didn’t come back, even when people started to lose interest. We’d heard about his work at STAR Labs and we’d taught him better than to abandon his responsibilities like that. But he didn’t come back for them either. For five years, every time there was a call or a visitor, I expected it to be him, but it never was. Then at some point I stopped. I still hoped he’d come home one day, but I stopped expecting it.”

“I understand,” I said.

I really did. A one-man outfit like mine didn’t get many complicated trace jobs, but I’d seen the officers in the CCPD missing persons unit. They could only do it for so long before burning out. People vanish. The rule is that if they’re not back in forty-eight hours then you’re probably looking for a corpse. It’s a piece of cruel luck if the homicide guys find one for you, because at least that way you know. If you don’t then you have to keep going, asking the same questions and hearing the same answers. None of it helps. A week passes, then a month and then another couple of faces land on your desk, and you forget. Everybody forgets. Everybody but the people waiting at home.

Mrs Rathaway finished her second drink. She put the glass down and didn’t pick it up again. She said, “If there is a chance that your investigation can find my son before I die, then I would like to take it.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “Tell me about Hartley.”

Mrs Rathaway smiled slowly. I wondered if the drinks had just been to take the edge off the stories she was about to tell. “Hartley was a brilliant boy,” she said. “The newspapers called him a prodigy, and he was. He always got such high praise at school. Not always high marks, though. He was usually too smart for his teachers and would stand up for himself if he thought they were wrong. We raised him not to be ashamed of his intelligence, Mr Thawne.”

“Okay,” I said.

“He loved numbers, just like Osgood. But he was also an excellent musician. That was my influence, and that needed more work than the mathematics.”

“Why?”

“We didn’t like to talk about it, but this became common knowledge anyway. Hartley was born with a  defect to his ears. He was deaf. But Osgood and I wouldn’t leave him to a lifetime of disability. We took him to the finest doctors in the world and they were able to almost completely restore his hearing.”

The stories about Rathaway had danced around a medical condition, but they hadn’t been specific. It was a long way down the list of interesting things about him. “Almost?” I asked.

She gave a relaxed wave. “He insisted on using a hearing aid sometimes. I told him it would just interfere with his sense of pitch, so he never wore it when he played.”

“What did he play?”

“I hoped he’d learn strings like I did, but he preferred woodwind. The flute was his favourite. He could play several Bach sonatas from memory. I… don’t remember which ones anymore.”

I made a note and then said, “After he disappeared, you expected him to come back. Had he run away before?”

“Oh. Twice. But the first time was just because he wasn’t happy at his prep school. He was fourteen. He and another boy went to New York to see the boy’s brother. They were only gone for a few days before they were brought home. Afterwards, Osgood arranged for him to go to a new school. He did much better there.”

“And the second time?”

“The second time was actually how he met Harrison Wells. Doctor Wells was giving a series of lectures in Metropolis while Hartley was at university in Central City. Hartley wanted to meet him, so he just flew out there without telling anyone. Osgood went to get him, but he would have come home on his own.”

“So he didn’t call or leave a note?”

“That wasn’t Hartley’s way, Mr Thawne. If he wanted to do something, he just did it. He always thought he knew best.”

By now the coffee was cool enough to drink. I had some. It rolled down my throat as easily as Mrs Rathaway’s drink had rolled down hers. They probably had it flown straight from Italy, and I thought it was worth the price.

I said, “Can you tell me about Hartley and Harrison Wells?”

“Hartley and Osgood never saw eye to eye. I suppose it was because Hartley preferred science to economics. But Osgood always pushed him to be the best at whatever path he chose. Hartley wouldn’t have been the scientist he was without that. But Harrison Wells praised him. He recruited Hartley as soon as he finished college and promoted him as fast as he could. That made Hartley think he could do no wrong. In his eyes, neither could Doctor Wells. Whenever we disagreed, it just caused an argument.”

“What about Hartley’s work at STAR Labs?”

Mrs Rathaway frowned. “He was very secretive about it,” she said. “Or he thought the science was too complicated to explain. It was easier to read Doctor Wells’ statements in the newspapers.”

“So there were never any problems?”

She managed a fond smile from somewhere. “Oh, there were problems. There were suppliers behind schedule, engineers who couldn’t read instructions, city bureaucrats tying things up in red tape. At times he would sound just like Osgood does when he talks about his fund managers. But Doctor Wells would always find a solution. Or, if he was busy with his family, Hartley would do it himself.”

“Nothing serious?”

“No. Hartley was never anything but confident in his work there.”

“So that couldn’t have been the reason why he disappeared?”

“No. I can’t think how.”

“Then why do you think he left?”

Mrs Rathaway’s hand jerked towards the decanter again. This time she managed to restrain it.

“I think he was having problems in his personal life. That must have been it. He didn’t talk about anyone outside work, but he must have had friends. It must have been something very serious for him to leave like that.”

“But you don’t know what it was? Problems with a girlfriend maybe?”

Her eyes flickered towards the door. “I don’t know,” she said quickly. “He was always a very private boy.”

I took another gulp of coffee. My stomach was starting to twist, and it wasn’t from the drink.

“When was the last time you saw Hartley?” I asked.

She bowed her head and took a few slow breaths, as though she was praying. Then she said, “He called me here. He said we should have dinner. I said we could, but it wouldn’t be right if Osgood didn’t come too. He got… agitated. He said he wanted to talk to me alone. I tried to calm him down but he hung up.”

“Do you know what he wanted to talk about?”

“He didn’t say. He’d been very busy and I thought he just wanted to catch up. I… I don’t know why he got so upset.”

“And that was the last time you spoke to him?”

“Yes,” she said, still addressing the carpet. “Yes it was. A few days later he came to the house. I was out and Osgood was very busy so he asked Hartley to come back later. But he never did.”

She still didn’t look up. She was shivering now, drowning in very old tears.

“Mrs Rathway,” I said. “I hate to ask this, but is there still a reward for finding your son?”

“Yes,” she said, gaining strength from the subject change. “Fifty thousand dollars. Is that important?”

“Not to me. But it might be to some people.”

“Thank you, Mr Thawne. Is there anything else?”

“Not right now. I’ll call if I have any more questions.”

Mrs Rathaway sat back in the chair. Her head tilted upwards, focussing on the books behind my head. It was a minute before she could manage eye contact again.

“My husband would like to see you before you leave.”

“Sure,” I said.

I left her reading the titles of empty books and went out of the library. I closed the door as softly as I could. She was going for the decanter again.

The butler was waiting for me. He led me back into the foyer. Osgood Rathaway was standing in the centre of it. He was a tall man, hunched over in an undertaker’s black suit, but his eyes were still almost level with mine. Where his wife’s face could still remember its youth, he looked as if he had every penny of his fifty million dollars pressing down on him, twisting his back, pulling at his jowls and ripping the hairs from his head one at a time.

“Mr Thawne,” he said. His voice was the only thing about him that still seemed strong.

I held out my hand. After a minute, he decided to shake it.

“Thank you for seeing me,” I said.

“Don’t thank me,” Rathaway said. “I didn’t want you to come at all. So my wife and I made an agreement. First you would hear her opinions, and then you would hear mine.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Mr Thawne, my son is dead. He took his own life.”

I stared at him. He’d delivered the news like somebody talking about the Crash of ’29. Bad at the time, but nothing you could do about it now.

“You’re sure about that?” I asked.

Rathaway gave a weary sigh. He wasn’t used to explaining himself. “Where else has he been for seventeen years?”

“Why do you think it was suicide?”

His eyes were lighting up. “I never like cops,” he said. “They don’t know when to stop asking questions.”

“I’m not a cop, Mr Rathaway,” I said. “Anything you tell me will stay confidential.”

“Well, if it will convince you… I suppose Rachel told you that my son and I disagreed? She wouldn’t have told you this was because Hartley made choices in his lifestyle that he couldn’t expect me to support.”

“What sort of choices?”

He gave me another keen look, probably wondering if I’d already guessed what he was about to say. “Mr Thawne, my son believed that he was a homosexual.”

I didn’t say anything. Rathaway didn’t seem to care.

“There was an… incident, when he was at school. A cry for attention. I found him a new school and he never saw the other boy again. That should have been the end of the matter. But despite my best efforts to convince him of the consequences, he kept on trying to make a public issue of it. I even told him that he could never expect to inherit the Rathaway fortune if he refused to carry on the family line. He claimed he didn’t care.”

“And that’s why you think he killed himself?”

“No. He was stubborn. He said working for STAR Labs was enough for him. Did Rachel tell you about their last conversations? He was probably asking for her help to change my mind. Or perhaps he wanted to tell us about his liaisons. That’s why I wouldn’t see him when he came to the house afterwards. This sort of acting out was excusable when he was a teenager, but not from a grown man. I think that’s what made him realise what he’d done to the family. But I would have been willing to forgive him if he’d wanted to make amends. Instead… he chose the other path.”

“You didn’t mention this at the time,” I said.

Rathaway’s voice took on a patient quality I liked even less than the anger. “I didn’t think he was capable of being so selfish at the time. We assumed he’d simply gone somewhere to clear his head. Or perhaps he’d run away with his new… friend and he’d return once the infatuation faded and he realised his mistake. That’s why I was so reluctant to tell the police. It would just have given Hartley attention, and that might only have encouraged him. That’s why Doctor Wells agreed to handle it for me.”

“He did?”

“Yes. He said if it was the only way to make sure that Hartley was alright, he would speak to the police and the press for me. So I agreed. Then… when Hartley didn’t come back… I realised what he must have done.”

I gave myself a minute to think about it, then asked, “What about his flute? Did he take it with him?”

“He left that thing here when he moved out,” Rathaway said. “I sold it ten years ago, along with all his other possessions. He won’t need them where he is now.”

“No body was every found,” I said, just for the sake of arguing.

“And no alive Hartley either,” Rathaway replied, suddenly sounding like a sleepy old man. “If you can explain it, then you can have your fifty thousand dollars. Goodbye, Mr Thawne.”

He barely touched my hand to shake it. He turned away and made no sound at all walking up the stairs.

“The car is waiting, Mr Thawne,” the butler said.

“Thanks,” I said, really meaning it.

My own steps cracked on the flagstones as I went outside. The wind in the leaves was a welcome rush of life. Behind me, the door to the Rathaway mansion closed with the finality of a tomb.


	11. Hiding on the Backstreets

The Mercedes was a fine ride through the rush hour, but I wasn’t sorry to see it barge its way down the street after David dropped me back at my building. I went upstairs and opened the window. The late afternoon air gave the office a sharp chill, but that helped me concentrate. I stood at the sill for five minutes watching the traffic go by and then shut the window and called Sara Lance.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice hollow on the line.

“How bad is it?”

“The depends on which side of the table you’re sitting on,” she said. “Things are looking great for Detective Zolomon. Barry told his story for the tape. Twice. He’s going to be arraigned first thing Monday morning and he wants me to put in a guilty plea. The best I can do is ask the DA for voluntary manslaughter and hope we get lucky with the judge.”

“Is that going to work?”

“I… I don’t know. Depends on where the DA goes. If she wants to make a splash then she’ll go for murder. I’m hoping she just wants this whole thing to go away.”

I sat back in the chair and let out a long sigh. “This doesn’t make sense.”

Sara still had enough energy left for anger. “No shit it doesn’t make sense! Barry keeps his mouth shut for a day until Zolomon comes in with his smart theory and he confesses. All I ask is a little consistency!”

“Is there anything you can do?”

“Right now, I’ve got to spend all weekend working my ass off so Barry gets a short sentence. And making sure nobody sticks a knife in him while he’s there. A cop with a microscope is still a cop.” I heard the sound of something being squeezed hard in the background. She probably went through stress balls by the hundred. “If you want, you can consider your contract with me ended. I’ll even write you a nice review if I ever get the time.”

I took a full second to consider the offer. “And what if I don’t?” I asked.

Sara laughed. It had a harsh edge to it, but I got the feeling that wasn’t for me. “You know, I was kinda hoping you’d say that. Okay, Eddie, it looks like the only way we’re going to dodge this bullet is if the cops drop the charges. So if you want to throw a Hail Mary in the next two days with that angle you’re working, you have my permission to try. Alright?”

“Alright.”

“Okay. Just don’t tell anybody I said that. Good luck.”

“You too, Sara,” I said, and hung up.

I took five, then called Joe. The phone rang out and went to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message. I was still thinking about calling back when he called me.

“Hey, Eddie,” he said. I could tell I was a long way down the list of people he wanted to talk to.

“Hey, Joe. How’s Iris doing?”

“You talk to Sara Lance?”

“Yeah.”

“Then how do you think Iris is doing?”

“Is she still at your place?”

“No. She went back home. Linda’s with her.”

“That’s good.”

Joe got tired of being a news ticker. “What do you want, Eddie?” he asked.

“Can I buy you dinner, Joe?”

“No.”

“Please, Joe. It’s important. There’s some things I need to tell you.”

I was weighed and measured again. He found me worthy, but only just.

“Alright. If you’re buying, meet me at the Bourbon at seven.”

* * *

The Bourbon was Central City’s premier Cajun bar and grill. The fact that it had no competition didn’t stop the owner playing the connection for all it was worth. The outside’s most distinctive feature was the weird font they used on the sign, but the interior was supposed to transport you half way to a shack out in the bayou with the promise that the food would do the rest. The dark walls were decorated with the images of jazz icons. Single lanterns hung from the burnt-umber ceiling to provide what passed for light. The tables left you just enough room to keep your elbows out of someone else’s gumbo. The curved and crowded bar was lit up in violent pink neon, highlighting a warning to beware of alligators.

I was far enough ahead of the rush that I got a table without waiting. I sat down and picked a beer off the menu and waited to see if Joe would stand me up. If he’d really wanted to talk to me, he’d have picked a restaurant we both liked.

But he wasn’t even late. He came in, asked for a beer of his own and then ordered a plate of thermonuclear ribs without checking the menu. I asked for a barbecue chicken burger as quietly as I could.

“So what do you want, Eddie?” he asked.

“It’s about Barry.”

“Of course it is.”

His eyes were hard as coals. I tried to smile, but I couldn’t remember how. The longer he looked at me, the hotter something in my chest got until every other sound in the bar was drowned out by the grinding of my teeth.

“What?” I bit off. “What is it? You’ve got something you want to say to me, Joe? Say it.”

“You sure?” Joe said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure.”

“Eddie, what the hell do you think you’re doing on this case? _Near_ this case? You tell Iris you’re gonna help her and then you go running round the city doing God knows what while Internal Affairs sticks a murder rap on Barry. If this is because of you and her then I swear –”

I took a page from Sara Lance’s book and hit the table. The beer bottles jumped. A couple of guys at the bar turned around, waiting to see if I was going to hit anything else. I didn’t, I just kept staring at Joe.

“This is not about me and Iris,” I said. “She hired me to do a job, and that’s what I’m doing. This case doesn’t make any sense, Joe. You know that. But if I’m going to figure out what’s really going on before they send Barry to Iron Heights like his dad then I need your help. Please.”

Something came back into Joe’s eyes. They opened up and he sat watching something I couldn’t see.

“When did you find out about Barry’s dad?”

“Yesterday,” I said. “Iris never told me.”

Joe said, “I raised that boy after his mom died. Raised him like he was my own. And I needed him just as much as he needed me. He lit up our house every day, and he made Iris light up like nobody else could. I knew right from the start how it was gonna end. One day he’d be giving her Grandma Esther’s ring.

“But I’ve been a cop for thirty years. Every day I go out and I see the worst people can be. But I let Henry Allen pick up Iris from school. She was my baby girl and I sent her over to his house for Fourth of July. I drank the man’s beer and watched the Superbowl on his tv. So sometimes… sometimes I’d catch myself looking at Barry and wondering. And the closer they got the harder it was to stop looking. The night after the wedding I went home and drank a whole bottle of scotch just so I wouldn’t think about… about…”

“His mom.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, with a sigh heavier than mountains.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m gonna ask you something. Do you think Zolomon’s right? In your gut, do you believe Barry’s confession? Or are you just afraid?”

“Of course I’m afraid,” Joe said. His eyes started to harden again. “But that confession is bullshit.”

The heavy thump of plates gave us both the breather we needed. Joe’s eyes went back to something like human, and I took a bite of my burger to work the tension out of my jaw.

“I have a theory,” I said, then had to correct. “Parts of a theory. After STAR Labs, Barry started looking into the Hartley Rathaway case.”

Joe gave me a long glare and took his frustrations out of one of his fire-flavoured ribs. “I could have told you he’d do that,” he said. “He’s always had a thing for unsolved cases. The weirder the better. Last time, he ran off to Starling City chasing reports of some guy in a hood beating up purse snatchers. Never found him.”

“Did you work the Rathaway case?” I asked.

“There was no Rathaway case,” Joe said, peeling the flesh and sticky sauce from the bones with skill that was a little scary to watch. “Not for the CCPD. It was all in the papers, but we had nothing. There was never a ransom demand and we never found a note. He didn’t tell anybody where he was going. No one could remember where they’d seen him last. He didn’t use his cards but he probably had access to enough cash to buy himself a whole new life, including plastic surgery. The guys we sent round to his apartment thought there might have been some clothes missing from the closet. That’s all.”

“They thought it was a couple of shirts, some underwear, a razor and maybe a laptop,” I said. “Enough for a week away at most.”

That pulled Joe’s attention away from the meat. “How did you know that?” he asked.

“I read the old articles.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing all afternoon?”

“No,” I said. “I spent the afternoon having coffee with Mr and Mrs Rathaway.”

Joe dropped his rib. That might have been because it was bare, but he didn’t try to pick up another one. I had another mouthful instead of smiling.

“Did you know Hartley Rathaway was gay?” I asked.

“Does that matter?”

“I don’t know if it was supposed to be a secret or not. But his dad threw him out of the house when he came out. Disinherited him too. His mom really wants to find out what happened to him but she acts like it was nobody’s fault. Like he just decided to just take a long vacation one day and never got around to coming back.” I thought about the old woman and her trembling hands some more. “I guess she feels guilty about what she did. Or what she didn’t do.”

“And his father?”

“He thinks Hartley killed himself to save the family honour and we’ve just never found the body.”

Joe’s eyes got hot again. He’d gotten over his objections to Iris dating a cop. He’d given her away to the son of a man who’d killed his own wife. If Iris had brought Linda Park to the West family Christmas instead of me or Barry, they’d both have gotten the same welcoming embrace and mugs of Grandma Esther’s eggnog.

I said, “Hartley’s parents didn’t know anything about his life before he disappeared. The more I hear, the more it sounds like the only person who did was Harrison Wells.”

Joe trimmed the next rib mechanically. “Barry starts looking into Hartley Rathaway… and Harrison Wells is murdered. You think there’s a connection?”

“Maybe. I talked to Barry’s friend Doctor Snow about it. She said he found something. He was asking questions about the Darbinyan Family.”

“Who told you that?”

I finished my beer and put the bottle out of reach. We were in public and his hands were covered in the Bourbon’s secret sauce, so he probably wasn’t going to hit me.

I said, “Leonard Snart.”

Joe stared at me, like he was trying to remember if we’d met before. “Are you serious?” he asked.

“Look, I’ve had a busy couple of days.”

“Eddie, what the hell were you doing talking to Leonard Snart?”

“No, what the hell was Leonard Snart doing talking to _me_?”

“So he told you that Barry was asking about the Darbinyans?”

“Yeah. Barry was at the Nemean Club the night Wells died. Doctor Snow didn’t mention that to Zolomon. Barry spoke to the bartender, but didn’t get anything. That’s what Snart says.”

Joe looked at his plate. Maybe he was trying to get a prophecy out of the animal bones like a Roman high priest.  

“There’s nothing to get,” he said. “The Darbinyans have been out of Central City for ten years.”

“They had a hitman, didn’t they? You and Chyre brought him in.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Kyle Nimbus. Fred retired the day after they sent him to the gas chamber. Said his job was done.”

We took a moment of silence for a good man and an evil one.

Joe said, “Wells, Hartley and the Darbinyans. You really think there’s a connection?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what I need your help to figure out.”

“How?”

“If Barry was doing his own cold case work on Rathaway, then where is it? Iris and the cops have been through his house. She told me he was working late a lot even though he wasn’t on anything official. It can’t be on the servers where anybody could find it, so it has to be in the lab itself. Can you get me in there?”

Joe cleaned his fingers slowly and methodically. The sauce stains still showed vividly against his dark skin. He’d still have them tomorrow.

“Not tonight,” he said.

“Joe, come on. We’ve got two days.”

He sighed. He wasn’t angry this time, just disappointed.

“Eddie, it’s Friday night. Remember what happens at the station on Fridays? The only way you’d get in without being noticed is drunk and disorderly.” He shook his head slowly, weighing the decision with his chin. “Meet me out back at nine a.m. tomorrow, alright?

“Alright. Thanks, Joe.”

“Thank me by picking up the check,” he said. “Anybody asks, you wanted a favour for another job and I told you to go to hell. Got it?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

He dropped the stained napkin down on the ossuary his plate had become and headed for the bathroom. Then he went straight out. Nobody else caught the glance he threw me from the doorway.

“Where’d your friend go?” the waitress asked when she came back around.

“He’s got a hot date,” I said.

She looked me up and down and said, “That’s too bad. How about a slice of pie?”

* * *

I tried to look calm and confident as I walked towards the precinct the next morning. I was there on normal business and nobody should look at me twice or think I was up to something. It was working. They were all too busy having a Saturday morning to pay me any attention.

I was headed for the smaller side entrance, the one I hoped Joe had told me to meet him at. I went around the last corner and almost walked straight into Hunter Zolomon. I deserved an award for not breaking my stride.

“Hey Eddie,” he said. “What brings you here?”

He spoke with a smile, but the rest of him told a different story. He was standing against the station wall like he was waiting for a blindfold and a last cigarette. I’d seen him on the news last night telling a street full of reporters that an arrest was imminent. He still hadn’t given Barry Allen’s name and probably wouldn’t until they were marching him up the courthouse steps on Monday. That gave Zolomon the weekend to make his case and the rest of the cops time to brace for impact.

Zolomon had to know that was what they were doing. He hadn’t got the Wells case over the finish line yet, and whatever credit he got for solving it in less a than a hundred hours would pale in comparison to the fury of the CCPD for throwing one of their own under the bus for the crime of the decade, no matter how justified it might be. Not to mention exposing the department to its worst publicity since Leonard Snart’s one-man crime wave. At the very least, he’d have to drive really carefully on this side of the bridge. It’s amazing how many traffic laws you can break when every patrolman in the city hates your guts.

With all that in mind, I gave him carefree with both barrels. “I’m here to meet Ms Lance,” I said. “We have to settle my bill.”

He gave a slow, heavy nod. “So you’re off the case?”

“What case?” I said. “Allen confessed, so they don’t need me anymore. If I’m lucky I might squeeze a testimonial.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Zolomon said.

He went back inside. I thought about pretending to smoke a cigarette, but less than a minute later, Joe came out.

“Were you talking to Zolomon?” he asked.

“Sorta. You saw him too?”

“I went past him on my way out.”

“How’d he look?”

“Like he just heard the cafeteria’s out of soy milk.”

“Yeah. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

We went inside and took three flights of fire stairs up to an empty corridor. Joe silently ordered me to stay put while he walked towards the big slab of steel which the forensics lab used as a door. I tried to find the best place to stand out of sight and hoped nobody pulled the fire alarm.

Our paranoia was justified. As soon as Joe went into the lab, somebody said, “Detective West? Can I help you?”

I knew who it was from the _Harry Potter_ accent. Julian Albert, the station’s other resident CSI. Most officers just called ‘the Limey’, because he was British and about as sour.

“Hey Julian,” Joe said, sounding like he’d rather walk in on Captain Singh’s wedding night. “You’re in early.”

“Yes, well, since Allen is… indisposed, someone has to pick up the slack.”

“Yeah. I just wanted to have a look around. Make sure he and Iris hadn’t left anything they needed in here.”

“Detective West, it’s strictly against departmental regulations to leave personal items in the lab. Or to allow access to unauthorised personnel.”

“I know, Julian,” Joe said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“At this point, that’d be like putting a plaster on a missing limb,” Albert said.

I could imagine the hurricane gathering on Joe’s face. Albert must have seen it. He said, “Look, everybody knows Allen and I weren’t exactly the best of friends, and to be honest, I always assumed that if he was going to murder anybody it would have been me…” His attempt to raise the mood just dropped it further. “But I never thought he was capable of anything like that. I suppose it just goes to show you never really know someone.”

“Julian…” Joe said. I couldn’t tell if it was a plea or a warning.

“Alright, detective. I didn’t have breakfast, so I’ll go and see what the cafeteria has to offer. You have half an hour.”

There were a few indistinct administrative noises from the lab and then a set of quiet footsteps heading away towards the main stairs. I held my breath till I couldn’t hear them anymore. Joe gave it a minute and then opened the fire door.

“Yeah, I don’t know how nobody’s shot him either,” he said.

We didn’t waste any time slipping into the lab. It was a vast industrial chamber, given to the forensic department because nobody could figure out what else to do with it. The walls were bare concrete, undecorated except for a few faded procedures and the emergency drill. At least the skylight and the tall windows at the far end made it feel open. Tall grey shelving units ran around the perimeter, holding multi-coloured chemicals, test tubes and distorted beakers. The equipment was mostly for basic sampling and recording, dating from the era before Johnny Cochran showed how careful you had to be about contamination. Only the basic analysis and interpretation was done here, all the biological samples were sent to the brand new lab at Central City Hospital, where they had to form a line with other inquiries from Keystone and Coast City.

The CSIs worked from a cluster of low-grade office furniture in the middle of the lab. They all had widescreen monitors and piles of waiting files. Two things gave away Allen’s desk: his had a bigger pile and a framed photo of Iris.

“What are we looking for?” Joe asked.

“Something that doesn’t belong here,” I said, trying to sound confident.

I’d fallen back on the old cop’s assumption that while we never knew what we were looking for, we’d know it when we found it. It was all we had.

Closing the door would just have attracted attention, so we got started and just had to hope nobody saw us. Joe took Allen’s desk and I went around the rest of the lab. For all the intimidating complexity, there was a method to the alchemical madness on the shelves. As far as I was concerned the labels might have been written in Ancient Greek, but they followed a pattern, moving from one to the next in such a way that somebody who actually understood the strings of syllables could probably come in straight from Starling and find exactly what they needed. I didn’t have time to dwell on that, I went from shelf to shelf and bench to bench ruling out any of them as somewhere you could hide something sensitive.

I did a full lap of the room and arrived beside Allen’s desk with Joe checking the photo frame. “Nothing,” he said. “Well, nothing Barry shouldn’t have.”

“You sure?”

“Eddie, I’ve been reading these files half my life. I know what they look like.”

He opened Allen’s desk drawers as a demonstration. The lower one had all the depth, and that contained three green files with carefully marked serial numbers that told me the contents without having to open them. The shallower drawer was just compartmentalised stationary. I had a brief flare of hope at the sight of a USB drive, before I recognised it as one of the standard-issue CCPD drives which were constantly checked by the computer system firewalls and you had to hand in to IT for cleansing every month to avoid any chance of contamination.

Joe folded his arms. “What now?” he asked.

I didn’t want to look at his tired disappointment. I turned on the spot instead. Albert’s desk was out, unless Allen was even more reckless when we thought. The safe by the window had to be public access, and so did the cabinets next to it. I tried them anyway, and found where the CSIs hid their office printer, blank paper and dwindling supply of post-it notes. I even checked the cork board behind the city map.

“Eddie,” Joe said, and tapped his watch.

Twenty minutes gone and we’d looked everywhere. Everywhere except the very bottom of the metal chest resting against wall behind the map, which I’d only just realised had a handle. The top layers held the lab’s camera equipment, but the bottom drawer was too small for that. It was also locked.

“Is there a key around anywhere?” I asked.

Joe opened Allen’s stationary drawer again. He pushed aside a box of paper clips and picked out a small key with an plain green tag. He tossed it over and I gave it a try. It turned.

There was nothing inside but a plain manila folder. It wasn’t standard issue. It didn’t have any serial numbers. I picked it up carefully. It was thick and densely packed, but nothing came loose as I opened it.

I’d have known the first page anywhere. It was the opening of a crime report form, but it wasn’t quite the standard formatting I’d learned to sleepwalk through. The date at the top said 3/18/2000.

That’s as far as I got, because I saw the photograph stuck to the folder’s inside cover. There was a woman lying in a narrow, carpeted hallway at the top of a flight of stairs. Her head was tilted to one side, sparing the photographer her empty gaze. One arm was limp against the floor, the other gathered at her breast as though she were saying a prayer. There was a viscous red stain spreading across the waist of her blouse and smears like crimson brands across the carpet and the wall.

It was ten leaden seconds before I recognised her. I’d only seen her once before, shining out of a picture taken long before the March night that Nora Allen had died.


	12. Further On Up the Road

“Joe,” I said. “Check the corridor.”

Joe couldn’t see what was in my hands, but he heard something in my voice that took him back to a time when we were both cops. He went to the door and looked both ways. No matter what, you back your partner.

“Clear,” he said.

I put the file down on Allen’s desk. The pages clattered against each other as I started to turn them. Joe stood next to me. Neither of us were watching the door but nobody who came in would see what was on the table. That seemed more important.

The first pages were the crime report form. They didn’t just look wrong because it was an older form. The paper in the file was thin and cheap, and the writing on it had no texture. The emptier parts of the pages had a dark hue that really gave away that the whole thing had been Xeroxed. The photo on the cover was the same, and so was the charge sheet that came next. I flicked through pages of statements, glimpsing familiar names, and then found a whole block of crime scene reports. There was life in those, red markings circling and annotating the original conclusions like a teacher. Must try harder, see me after class.

How long had Allen worked in this building? How many trips had he made to the records room, painstakingly reassembling this file one borrowed piece at a time like Johnny Cash’s Cadillac?

I’d stopped without realising. Under my fingers was the transcript of a 911 call. A single line played in my head, over and over again, the voice of a little boy a long time ago telling the operator _Help, please I need an ambulance! Someone’s hurt my mom!_

“Jesus,” Joe said in my ear. “He… he shouldn’t have this.”

I tried to swallow around the desert in my mouth. Any other day, this could kill Allen’s career. Today it could do a lot more than that.

“We have to get out of here,” Joe said.

He’d forgotten the badge on his hip. I hadn’t, but that wasn’t my choice to make. I closed the drawer, locked it and put the key back. Then I took off my jacket and threw it over one arm, hiding the file.  

We went out side by side, not fast and not slow. We kept pace like we were on parade and guarded the file between us. We watched everybody we passed until we reached my car.

In the passenger seat, Joe pulled the file protectively into his lap. He let the pages run, barely lifting the cover to see them.

“Joe, I think you’d better let me have that,” I said.

He put a hand on the top cover. “Why?”

“Because you’re a cop and I’m not.”

Joe clenched his fist. I feared for the safety of my dash, but he just hammered hopelessly against his knee.

“God damn it, Barry! Why’d you have to be so stupid?”

I gave him a few minutes to breathe. When there was a little less red in his cheeks, I said, “I guess this has too much conflict of interest to use to get a re-trial.”

“No kidding,” Joe said. “If anybody found this, he’d probably be talking to Zolomon anyway.”

“Then I guess it’s really lucky we found it before Zolomon did.”

Joe put his other hand on the file. He gripped it tight. We were thinking the same thing, he just didn’t want to say it. So I did.

“Finding the guy who killed your mom would look like a pretty good motive for murder. We all know Barry’s confession is wrong. Even Zolomon knows it. So what if he finds out that Barry just confessed to stop the investigation and get a light sentence? This gives him a reason. This might make it premeditated murder.”

“What reason?” Joe said, his voice climbing again. “I was there that night. I know what’s in the file. Tell me how this gives Barry a motive to kill Wells?”

“I can’t,” I said. “But I don’t have to. Neither does Zolomon. Suppose he goes to the judge on Monday and says Barry went around to interrogate Wells, threatened the man with his own gun and then shot him? Then Barry’s either got to plead to Murder One or go to trial. If he doesn’t take a plea bargain then Zolomon’s got time to find the connections he needs between Barry’s friendship with Wells and his _obsession_ with his mom’s death.” 

I’d never seen Joe West look scared before. It took me back to the cardiac ward in Keystone where I found out my father was a man like all the others. I looked away, at the pages trying to climb out of the folder, and tried to think.

“Eddie, what do we do?” Joe asked.

“I need another favour,” I said.

“Okay,” Joe said, and right then I could have asked him for his whole record collection and his immortal soul.

I said, “Hartley Rathaway… Harrison Wells... Nora Allen…. If Barry thought there was a connection, then he might have got some of it from his father. Can you get me into Iron Heights to see him?”

Joe said, “Eddie… Henry Allen isn’t in Iron Heights anymore.”

It was a couple of seconds before I could speak again. Two alternatives fought in my mind, and I didn’t know which one was worse.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He got out a year ago,” Joe said. “On parole. Barry was so happy he was in time to come to the wedding. He and Iris rearranged the seating plan at the last minute so they could fit him in.”

“So where is he now?”

“I don’t know exactly. He’s got a cabin in the mountains somewhere. Old family place.”

“Joe, I’ve gotta talk to him.”

Joe gave me another of his long, ancient sighs. He lifted the file out of his lap and handed it to me as if it weighed a ton. I took it and put it gently on the back seat next to one of my bags. Then Joe got out of the car and trudged back towards the station. I didn’t need to ask why. A parolee’s address is never hard to find.

* * *

I spent the next couple of hours skimming the Nora Allen file for any hint of Harrison Wells or Hartley Rathaway. There was nothing to find. The investigation was arrow straight. Detective Garfield built just enough of a case to get around Henry Allen’s stubborn unwillingness to confess. There were no signs of forced entry, nothing was taken and there was nobody in the house but the victim, the son and the man with blood on his hands. Any inconsistencies in the evidence could be ignored or glossed over because they had their guy. I wondered if I would have tried any harder; they never stopped telling us how small the resources were, so why waste them on a sure thing?

To shift that unanswerable question, I went back over my notes on the Allen whose life I could influence. It’s tough assembling a jigsaw when you don’t know what the finished picture’s supposed to be. Or what shape the pieces you have really are. Or which of them are yours and which belong to a completely unrelated puzzle.

Then I locked up the files in the safe pretending to be the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and looked up the address Joe had given me. It was in the mountains alright, almost at cloud level on the range that started rising to the south of the city. At least it didn’t look like I was going to need climbing gear to get up there.

I bought a meatball sub and hit the road.

The internet predicted a travel time of two hours. I managed to make it in three. The suburban tangle put up a fight and since I was headed the wrong way for the Interstate, I took one of the antique highways which turned into vehicular sand traps in the summer when people used them to escape the city heat for the jagged shade of the mountains. It was still too cool for that, so I set the cruise control for the speed limit and the CD player to reacquaint me with Asbury Park.

For more than an hour, I watched the horizon rise up in front of me and the ground to either side of the road start to harden and crack. Then I took what I found out ten minutes later was a wrong turn towards the higher ground. The narrow, aimless roads left me no choice but to backtrack. I found the right road, and followed it through a long, smooth valley carved patiently by the ice, where boulders sat in high grey lumps like dice tossed by giants.

The closer we got to the satellites which directed it, the more my navigation system struggled. I took another turn and passed a rising meadow and lake like an icy blue mirror, showing me a flawless reflection of the snow cap I seemed to be heading for.

The air started to bite. The spring clouds rolled down the mountain towards me. The fir trees lost their tops in the mist. Then, when the fog was reaching for me, I had to turn again and bump down a trail tracking a stream of chattering snow-melt.

The car went over a hard bounce and I wondered what would happen if the road got any rougher and the mountain tried ripping off my drive shaft. Then the car stopped trembling and the track smoothed out to one you could manage without extra ground clearance and four-wheeled-drive. I remembered that Allen got his Honda up here, if I was in the right place. I thought I was, the telephone poles standing bare amongst the trees gave me hope.

After a few minutes, the trailed curved away from the growing river and opened up into a clearing. I’d found the cabin. There was no artifice about it at all. The walls were heavy, interwoven logs that had once been the trees unlucky enough to grow on this chosen spot. The sloping roof was made of more even planks, with a shell of slate on top. A chimney built of mismatched brick poked out from the middle of the right side.

It was the kind of place a man would come to be cut off from the world. I guess it made sense that it was home for someone who’d been isolated against his will and now wasn’t sure how else to live. Everything around him was uneven, painted in shifting greens, browns, blues and whites. No hard grey walls, fences or bars would find him up here.

I got out of the car. The air tasted of grass and snow. There were only a couple of signs that the house’s owner wanted anything to do with the rest of the humanity. There was a well-worn red pickup truck off the side of the main trail whose details matched the ones Joe had slipped me. There was a telephone cable linked to the roof and a satellite dish almost camouflaged against the right-hand wall.  And there a word carved into the cross-section of a tree which hung from one of the posts on either side of the door. As I got closer I saw it was a name: Garrick.

I knocked on the door. There was no answer. The only response I got was a dull thump which I didn’t think came from inside. I knocked again. Another thump, and the cabin itself was silent.

I left the door alone and headed around the back. The next time I heard the sound, it was louder.

Henry Allen was standing beside a stump near the bank of the mountain creek which marked the edge of the cabin’s uneven yard. He lifted a wide-bladed axe over his head and brought it down in a long smooth swing to split a slab of wood into even halves. He could have been an old tree himself, already solid but now hardened and gnarled by storms. His hair gave him the same grey-white cap as the mountain. He wore a check shirt and blue jeans, working clothes from anywhere in the last hundred years. I felt like I was looking at a man who’d come loose in time.

“Doctor Allen?”

He didn’t let me stop his next swing. Another piece of wood split in two. He knelt down, inspected the halves, and added them to the pile. Then he let his left hand slip down the axe handle to hold it under the blade.

“Yeah?”

“I’m Eddie Thawne. I’m a friend of Iris and Barry.”

He looked back at me. He put the axe down on the stump and started pulling off his gloves.

“You a cop?”

I wondered if there was a guy following me around with some kind of sign. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Doctor Allen could see it after fifteen years talking to prison guards.

“I used to be,” I said.

“What are you now, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I’m a private detective.”

Doctor Allen nodded. “Then I guess you’d better come inside,” he said.

The cabin had no back door. We went around the front and he let me into a single long room. There was a leather couch and hand-carved coffee table facing the fireplace and the tv which had been wedged into the nearest corner. The other corner was a set of railed steps which led up into the raised bedroom. The kitchen looked modern, all the appliances were new so that the refrigerator stood out like a granite monolith against all the wood. The gap between the couches and the kitchen left just enough room for a circular dining table and some high stools. Everything was clean and well organised, even though Doctor Allen wouldn’t get many visitors. On the coffee table was a picture taken at Barry and Iris’ wedding. He was trying to keep his grin under control for the photographers. She was just as beautiful as I always knew she’d be.

I tried to find something else to look at and said, “It’s a nice place.”

“My grandfather built it when he retired,” Doctor Allen said. “That’s his name out front, in case you were wondering. Have a seat.”

We sat down around the table. He opened me an ice cold bottle of beer and poured himself a soda.

“Are you working for Barry’s lawyer?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “How much do you know about what’s happened?”

“Iris called,” he said. “She told me Barry’s being held in connection with Harrison Wells’ murder. As a material witness, whatever that means. She said there was nothing I could do, that she’d call when I could see him and that I should stay here for now.” He drained the soda in a convulsive jerk. “And God help me, I listened to her.”

I wondered how scary a police station would be to a guy who’d spent fifteen years in prison. Either it’d be no big deal, or the gates of hell. 

“Barry’s being investigated because he won’t talk,” I said. “The cops know he was at STAR Labs the night Wells died and they think he knows something but he won’t tell them what it is. I think he’s been threatened.”

“Threatened? How?”

“We’re not sure. But he’d only stay quiet if somebody he cared about was in danger. That could be Iris, or Joe West, or you.”

“But why?” Doctor Allen asked, two instincts fighting for control of him: the need to protect his son and the desire to stay as far as possible from anybody in a uniform.

“We don’t know,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. We have a… a theory. We know that Barry’s been doing his own investigation of his mother’s death.”

“We? Who’s we?” Doctor Allen’s voice was sharp.

I raised my hands. “Just me and Joe West. Nobody official. Barry made a copy of the file, but nobody else has seen it.”

Doctor Allen stared over my shoulder. “I thought he’d done something like that. He kept wanting to talk about what happened that night. He went through it over and over. He knew everything I’d said, things I couldn’t even remember. I told him to stop, that it wasn’t healthy and that he should just move on. I thought after he and Iris… It was enough they took away my life, I didn’t want them to take his too!”

If he squeezed the glass harder, I was sure it would shatter. He stopped, looked down at his own hands and then at me. He relaxed his grip one finger at a time.

“Whoever really killed Doctor Wells,” I said softly, “and whoever’s threatening Barry, I think it’s because he found something that connected his mom to the disappearance of Hartley Rathaway.”

“Hartley Rathaway? The missing millionaire’s son?”

 “That’s him. Did Barry ever say anything about that?”

He gave me another long look, searching for something in one of us, and said, “I know who you are, Mr Thawne.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. You and Iris used to date, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Barry told me everything Iris told him about you. He didn’t tell her how he felt until after she split up with you. He said it wouldn’t have been right. You were a good guy. That’s why I’m going to trust you.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was taking enough work to keep breathing.

Doctor Allen started talking. “Barry came here last month. He hadn’t visited for a while. We watched a hockey game and then he started asking about Nora. I said no. I didn’t want to talk about it. He said… that there was just this one last thing. Then he’d drop it. Forever. He wanted to know if Nora ever had a client called Pepper… no, sorry… it was _Piper_.”

“Piper?” I said.

“Yeah. That’s who Barry asked about.”

“So what did you tell him?”

Doctor Allen poured himself some water and sat down again. He wasn’t quite looking at me. He said, “Barry always thought Nora and I had a perfect marriage. I suppose he’s lucky. Sure, we argued, but we tried not to do it in front of him. But... after Nora got promoted we did it a lot more. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I really didn’t think being an accountant was as important as being a doctor. I should have tried harder.”

He stopped. I saw the shades of Iron Heights in his eyes. Long nights in a cell where the only company is the ghosts you brought in with you.

“Anyway,” he said. “A couple of weeks before… Nora died… we had another fight. She said I didn’t appreciate how important making partner was to her. I thought… I don’t know why, but I thought the only way to win the argument was to prove her wrong. So I bought her some flowers and went over to see her. Her secretary told me she was busy, but she was my wife and I was going to give her those flowers, so I went into her office anyway. She was on a telephone conference so she just thanked me and then basically threw me out. I don’t remember anything else, but Nora said the name Piper. She had to apologise when I came in.”

“So you don’t know what they were talking about?”

“No. Nora always used to remind me that accountants have confidentiality clauses too.”

We both drank a little, and I asked, “Do you know anything else about him? Anything that you told Barry?”

“Yeah… there was one thing. When Nora came home I apologised and then she apologised. Then she said that calls with Mr Piper were complicated because he was partially deaf and had a trouble using the phone sometimes.”

“Deaf?” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what Barry checked. Why is that so important?”

“Hartley Rathaway was deaf,” I said.

Doctor Allen nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But so are a lot of people. And if it was Rathaway, why was he calling himself Piper?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The website for Nora’s firm said the Rathaways are clients. Did she ever meet them?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did Barry ask about anything else that day?”

“No. That was all.”

I sat back for a minute. Henry Allen stayed still in his chair. I could have been trying to test my patience against a stone.

There was one more question I had to ask him, and no good way to do it. I just had to take the leap.

“Doctor Allen… what happened the night your wife died?”

He looked down at the tabletop and cleared his throat loudly, as though he was trying to force an evil spirit out of his body. “Yeah… sure,” he said. “Why not?”

Now it was my turn to wait. We both knew I knew the story. We both knew I needed to hear him tell it.

“There was... there was a party at the hospital that night. We were both going to go, but something came up at Nora’s firm and she had to spend most of Saturday working. We had another argument. She never complained when I had to work late or drop everything and go to the hospital. Since she’d lost the day, she wanted to spend the evening with Barry, because she’d barely seen him the last few weeks.” Rain was gathering in his eyes. “I guess it’s silly to be jealous of your own son, but I knew if I went without Nora I’d just spend the whole party with people asking about her and how things were going and I didn’t want to tell them. But I went anyway, and everybody tried really hard not to ask, which was worse. I had a few drinks to make it easier. Just a few. And then when I figured I was safe to drive, I went home.”

I didn’t speak. I waited to see what happened next. Henry Allen stood outside his home, seventeen years ago. I stood beside him.

“It was ten o’clock. Barry should have been in bed. The lights were still on downstairs. I went in, and as I closed the door I heard Nora shout my name from upstairs. I ran upstairs and… and she was lying at the top of the stairs outside our home office. There was blood all over her shirt. She’d been stabbed. I… I think there was a knife next to her. I put pressure on the wound. To stop the bleeding. Barry came out of his bedroom. I yelled at him not to look and told him to call 911. I did everything I could to stop the bleeding. I kept telling Nora to hang on because the ambulance was coming. It wasn’t fast enough.”

He looked at his hands. A doctor scrubs them clean so many times, but in Henry Allen’s mind, that blood would never come off. He wiped his eyes.

“I know why they thought I did it. I’m not sure I’d believe me either. But I didn’t kill my wife, Mr Thawne.”

“Doctor Allen… if you found the guy who did… what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I used to think about it. For the first couple of years. But I haven’t for a long time. Barry knows I would never have hurt Nora, and I guess that’s all that matters now.”

I made a show of making some notes, even though I knew his story would burn in my mind for a long time.

“Thank you, Doctor Allen,” I said. “I think that’s everything I came for.”

“Okay, but if you need anything else, you call me. Do you have the number?”

I checked my own cell phone. It couldn’t find a single bar.

Doctor Allen pointed to the small table beside the tv. “I’ve got a landline,” he said.

He wrote the number on the back of one of my cards. He hadn’t practiced for a long time, but he still had the doctor’s hieroglyphics down.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It was good to meet you, Mr Thawne.”

He walked me out and stood in his drive watching as I hauled my car around and back up the trail. He probably did that with all his visitors, standing by to call the AAA if they left any parts behind. I made it back to the road with my undercarriage in one piece and headed down the mountain.

It was starting to get late. The light was retreating from the sky and I felt like the fog was chasing me downhill. The trees expanded into shadows which seemed to reach out to block the way. I tried not to let it get to me, keeping my mind on the road and knowing that if I missed any of the corners then the car and probably my life would come to a sudden uncomfortable stop.

The gathering gloom made it tough to tell when I was clearing the mountain. I was only certain of it when my satellite navigation finished its anxiety attack and started offering me firm directions again. By that time my cell phone was trying to impress me with two bars of signal, but I waited until I was back on the highway before using it to call Joe. He either had less reception or a better way to spend the evening, because his voicemail picked up.

“It’s Eddie, I spoke to Doctor Allen. I can’t talk now but I need you to check something. Can you ask his parole officer if he made one of his unscheduled calls at any time after eight on Wednesday evening? Thanks.”

I hung up and called the Rathaways, hoping that they hadn’t seen me as a reason to change their number again.

If they had, it was a work in progress, because the owlish butler answered. I reminded him who I was and asked if Mrs Rathaway could call me back as soon as was convenient. He seemed to understand that I meant urgent, because it was only four tracks before the cell rang again and stilled my CD player.

“What is it, Mr Thawne?”

“Mrs Rathaway, did Hartley ever mention a woman called Nora Allen? She was an accountant working for Fox and Lambert. She made partner around the time Hartley disappeared.”

“That is the firm we use. Allen? I think I know the name, but I can’t recall why.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted her to remember. I said, “So Hartley never mentioned her?”

“No… at least… There was something. The last time he called me, when he got upset, I asked him to calm down. He told me ‘that’s what she said’. He wouldn’t say what he meant. Does that help?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Thank you, Mrs Rathaway.”

We said goodbye. I didn’t switch the CD player back on. I drove in silence, listening to the wheels purring on the asphalt. Soon I could see Central City up ahead of me. The Saturday night lights gave it a halo against the dusk, but that was just a trick of the eye. There were no angels left in this town, and it's so hard to be a saint in the city.


	13. The Ties That Bind

There was still some blue left in the sky behind Halifax Towers when I pulled up outside, just like there had been for my first visit. Instinct told me Doctor Snow wasn’t afraid to spend Saturday nights at home.

Her car was still in the lot, so I took my chance with the buzzer. I rang twice. The second time there was a faint click but nobody spoke.

“Doctor Snow, are you there? It’s Eddie Thawne. I need to talk to you. It’s very important.”

I knew she could see me. I figured she was listening too.

“Doctor Snow, please. If you don’t let me in then an innocent man is going to go to jail.”

Still silence. For five seconds the speaker crackled on empty. I got desperate.

“Doctor Snow, if I have to, I’ll call Cisco and ask him.”

There was a sound like a finger-snap. The intercom said, “Alright. Come up.”

I came up. She opened her apartment door and let me far enough inside to close it behind me. Then she held me in the hallway, arms crossed, lips pressed together. She was wearing a dove-grey dress and a necklace of metallic snowflakes, but if I was wrong about her social life she didn’t mention it.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Doctor Snow, I need…”

She didn’t let me ask. “No,” she said. “You first. What did you mean?”

Her eyes didn’t give me a choice. It was that or spend the whole night arguing with a statue.

I said, “Barry Allen didn’t kill Doctor Wells. This whole time he’s been trying to protect somebody.”

“Who?”

“His father.”

Her arms fell to her side. “His father? Why would he want to hurt Doctor Wells?”

“Are you going to make me do this in your doorway?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” I said. “Barry found something that connected his mom’s murder to the disappearance of Hartley Rathaway. They both happened in the spring seventeen years ago.”

She did the sums in her head, subtracting the stories she’d grown up with from the ones Barry had told her. She said, “But Barry said his mom died in March. Hartley Rathaway didn’t go missing until April.”

“No,” I said. “He wasn’t _reported missing_ until April.”

She took a step back. “That… doesn’t prove there’s a connection,” she said.

“No, it doesn’t. But Barry figured out that his mom was talking to Hartley Rathaway a couple of weeks before she died and he disappeared. And he found something that ties in two of them with Harrison Wells and maybe even the Darbinyan family.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, Doctor Snow,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

She took another step. Then she went into full reverse, backing away into her lounge and landing on one of the couches when her legs ran out of places to go.

I said, “You knew he had something about Rathaway and the mob. When the two of you went to the Nemean Club, he took it with him. He wanted to ask Leonard Snart about it. But there must be a copy, because he didn’t want Snart taking his evidence away from him.”

“Why would I have it?” she asked.

 I threw everything I had at her. “I’ve tried everywhere else he would have kept a backup,” I said. “He must have given it to you. Or you took it for safe-keeping. And you didn’t say anything because after Wells died you figured out that there was probably something there about him too. Something to connect him to whatever happened to Rathaway. And if Wells could do that to his own protégé, then he wasn’t the man you thought he was, and everything you’ve done at STAR Labs and everything Ronnie Raymond died for is a lie.”

“That’s enough,” she said.

Her eyes glittered like shards of ice. Her iron control was all that kept them from melting into tears.

I sat down on the other couch. “Come on, Doctor Snow. Help me. Please. Help Barry. You’ve done it already. You didn’t tell Zolomon where you really went for drinks.”

She got up. She crossed the room on autopilot. She didn’t even wipe her eyes till she reached the bedroom and the door was half closed. It was a minute before she came out. She stood over me and reached out like she was bestowing a blessing or a curse. She held a rewriteable CD which had probably come out of a home office multipack. On the stale grey surface, somebody had neatly written the word _Piper_.

“Barry took a backup,” she said. “This is the original.”

“Have you seen it?”

“No.”

“I need to look at it.”

She took another trip into the bedroom and brought out a laptop that she laid on the coffee table like it was made of glass. While we waited for it to wake up, she said, “So if… _if_ this connects Doctor Wells to the death of Nora Allen, then this is Henry Allen’s motive.”

“Yeah,” I said. “A month ago, Barry had a talk with his dad where he realised that whatever’s on that CD meant that his mom had been in contact with Rathaway. Doctor Allen’s smart, he figured out the rest just like Barry did. So he came down to Central City to confront Wells about what he knew. I guess Wells pulled the gun and Doctor Allen took it away from him.”

Doctor Snow shivered. Her fingers slipped on the touch-pad as she tried to open the CD’s files.

“Sorry,” I said. “Barry got there afterwards, and he knew that if anybody found this, it’d send them straight to his dad, so he threw his copy in the river and refused to say anything to the cops.”

She hid herself behind well-trained detachment and carefully selected the CD icon. The drive hissed at us and the folder opened. Three image files and a sub-folder. She picked the file which required the least cursor movement and gave it a firm, determined click.

I wasn’t expecting anything. Or I was expecting everything. The file opened and rows and rows of carefully bracketed numbers stretched across the screen. Doctor Snow tried another file, then the third. They were all the same. Disappointment flashed in her eyes before it was blotted out by confusion. She looked up at me for confirmation.

“Bank statements?”

“Yeah,” I said. “From 1999. Do you recognise the account numbers?”

“No…” she said, and bit down hard on her lower lip as the read the bolded letters at the top of each page. “But… the Central Bank, Coast Group and SKC are the three local banks that STAR Labs uses.”

“You guys bank local?”

“Yes. It was part of Doctor Wells’ promise to make more investment available for local... oh my god.” She froze in the middle of her finance lecture. “Eddie… look at these numbers.”

She was pointing at the bold column at the statement’s right hand. I didn’t need to read the numbers. The minus signs told the story. Withdrawal after withdrawal. Payment after payment. In all three statements, the account’s balance had gone into the negative and kept on falling. It almost stopped me from noticing that the names of the recipients had been blacked out.

The statements must have started out on paper. Other than the home-made redactions, they were at slight irregular angles and there were a couple of random artefacts. A scan of a print-out. I wondered how many degrees of separation we were from the originals. The contrast got more obvious when we found some rows on each which were picked out by a jerky highlighter. Each row was deposit, messy-looking numbers that had untidy digits hanging after their decimal points. They pulled the accounts back towards the black before the withdrawal slide started again. The names of the depositors had been left visible.

“How much are those highlighted payments?”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” Doctor Snow said. “Exactly.”

I didn’t argue. I looked at the details of the investors that had come to the rescue. All of them were private companies with names so generic they could have been chosen to be forgettable. Maybe that was why they seemed familiar.

“Look at that.” Doctor Snow tapped the screen.

Further down, each account had a much bigger arrival. A reassuringly heavy payment from another anonymised source, enough to kick the numbers back towards the sky.

Then there were more highlights. These were a collection of uneven outgoings, paid to more institutions whose functions were impossible to guess from their non-specific names.

“Sixty thousand dollars exactly,” Doctor Snow said.

“Doctor Snow, I think I should take that.”

Her fingers on the pad were rapid and precise. She closed down the files, slipped the CD out of her laptop and snapped it into its case. She held the case out, but her fingers didn’t want to let go.

“What is this?” she asked. “Why was so much of it blanked out?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “You don’t know if those accounts had anything to do with Doctor Wells. You don’t know why those transactions were highlighted. You don’t have any reason to talk to anybody about this and I wasn’t here.”

She let me take the CD from her.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Goodbye, Mr Thawne,” she said.

* * *

I went back to the office, switched on the lights and closed the blinds. The building was empty. So was most of the sidewalk. Only the hum of East Hasting Street reminded me I wasn’t alone in the world. I turned on the radio to drown out the quiet and fed my computer the seventeen year old disk.

The statements hadn’t changed since Doctor Snow’s place. I checked the sub-folder. It held the same files and one for luck. A good scientist always tries to duplicate their results.

Then I went online. Unless you go to a real effort, the internet never forgets anything. Over the years, secrets that were buried in the dark become debris strewn on the wayside of the information superhighway. As I searched, I got the feeling I was following the footsteps of Barry Allen, who in turn had been tracking the directions left by his mother. The journey had probably brought him closer to the determined, intelligent, _alive_ Nora Allen than the rose-tinted recollections of ‘mom’ ever could.

When I was done, my head was spinning. I knew what I’d have to do to draw lines between those last dots and see the whole picture, but I couldn’t stop trying to think of another way. The case was an unexploded bomb that had lain dormant in the heart of Central City for nearly twenty years. There was no disarming it. I could go to Zolomon and watch him damn everybody in the blast radius, or I risk a controlled explosion and try to save as much as I could.

Other men go to bars to stop thinking. I went to the gym. I stripped off Mr Thawne the private detective and faced my opponent as Eddie the man. The heavy bag soaked up all my fear, frustration and doubt. It could take all that I could give. There was only one thing I held back: the desire, as I threw punch after punch, to feel the blows on my own chest, hitting me hard enough to stop my heart and finish the job the Mardon brothers had started.

I sank down the bench. My body was drained. My mind was empty. My heart went on beating. I wasn’t getting off that easily.

* * *

At 8:29 the next morning I was sitting in my car. The streets were taking a lazy Sunday lie-in. The angle of the sunlight was just a bit too sharp to be summer. I didn’t have the engine or the radio on. I just sat there watching the clock. It ticked over to 8:30.

Nobody called me to change my mind. I got out of the car and walked across the street to Doctor Wells’ house.

The drive was empty. The reporters were at home working on editorials or waiting for the news to restart on Monday morning. The gate was unlocked and nothing stopped me walking up to the door and ringing the bell.

Doctor Morgan took a few minutes to answer. She was wearing a cream sweater and navy slacks. The amount of colour had faded out of the pants and into the sweater told me they were house clothes only. Her hair still had fond memories of the bed but her eyes had been awake for nearly as long as mine.

“Hi, Doctor Morgan,” I said. “Can I come in? I need to talk to you.”

“Eddie, it’s very early,” she said. “Jesse’s still asleep. Can you come back later?”

“I don’t think I can, Doctor Morgan. It’s urgent.”

“What’s so important?”

I looked right and left, in case there was a journalist hiding in the hedge. Then I said, “I know why Barry Allen killed your husband.”

She crumpled. The door was all that kept her standing. She had to press both her palms against the glass. Then she pushed herself back upright, fumbling for the latch without taking her eyes off me.

“Come in.” It was nearly a plea. “Please come in.”

I walked behind her into the lounge, tensed and ready to catch her if she fell. She made it to the couch and sat down slowly. I remembered enough of the kitchen to find us glasses of water. Her hand trembled as she drank. Then she put the glass down and looked at me with clear eyes.

“Tell me,” she said.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “It goes back to 1999. STAR Labs was just a shell then, wasn’t it? I found some pictures of the Millennium fireworks display you put on. You can still see some of the superstructure.”

Doctor Morgan didn’t say anything. She might have gotten caught in the memories of the brilliant red, gold and blue flowers blooming in the sky that night as their silent reflections stretched out over the surface of the lake.

I went on. “That was almost the closest STAR Labs got to being finished. Everybody knew the work got delayed, but nobody knew that by the end of the third quarter, the project was almost out of money. Doctor Wells was about to hit the bottom of all his overdrafts and he still had a lot of bills to pay. He’d talked some of his creditors into taking deferments and he was moving money around so nobody would notice, but it wasn’t enough. The local banks weren’t going to loan him anything else, and if he went to one of the nationals then he’d be breaking the terms of the contract he made with the city and he’d lose all his tax breaks and incentives. If he went over the line, he’d have to declare bankruptcy and STAR Labs would be stillborn.”

I had a drink. The only sound in the room was Doctor Morgan breathing, in and out; hard, like she’d been running.

“But Doctor Wells had a chance. He was going to get a grant from the National Science Foundation that would have covered him, but it got delayed and then delayed again. So he got desperate. He just needed a little money to make his most urgent payments and he could talk his way out of the others until the grant came in. So he went to the only people in town who’d give him money quickly and quietly. The Darbinyan family.”

Doctor Morgan said, “No.”

“Yes,” I said. “He went to them and he borrowed fifty thousand dollars. They made it look like donations from local businesses, but the money came through shell companies owned by the family. So your husband made his payments, and nobody knew how close he’d cut it. Then, when the grant arrived, he gave the Darbinyans their money back, plus interest. Everything worked out fine. Until a couple of months later, when Hartley Rathaway found out.”

I gave us both a moment to breathe. Doctor Morgan wasn’t looking at me anymore. The story was beating her down. She had her head lowered, her chin propped on her clenched hands.

“Oh god,” she whispered.

“I guess we’re never going to know the whole story. Maybe your husband got careless or Hartley got a bit too proactive. But he found the bank statements showing the shell company loans and repayments. And when your husband realised what happened, he panicked. He was so close to finishing STAR Labs and he knew that this would kill it just as fast as the bankruptcy. He had a choice, between Hartley and his great vision… and he chose the dream. Hartley Rathaway is dead, Doctor Morgan. Your husband had him killed.”

Doctor Morgan raised her head. Her eyes were red but painfully dry. Perhaps she didn’t have any tears left. Her lips were contorting around a question, but I was ready with the answer.

“I guess your husband didn’t realise until afterwards that Hartley didn’t figure it out on his own. He’d gotten some of it from the statements, but not everything. Or maybe he didn’t want to believe what they were telling him. So he used a fake name and sent copies to the newly promoted partner in the accounting firm that his family used. He probably thought she was good enough to help him but she wouldn’t guess who he was, and if she did he could keep it quiet somehow. Her name was Nora Allen.”

I took the CD out of my pocket and laid it on the table. Doctor Morgan stopped blinking. Her eyes roamed over the scuffled plastic case, the angled lettering and the handwritten name. Her hand twitched towards it.

I said, “The Darbinyan shell companies are all on the record now, if you know where to look. It probably took Mrs Allen a lot longer than an evening online to put the pieces together, but she managed. Even then, she didn’t know who her source was, only that he had hearing problems that made it difficult to use the phone. And she didn’t know who the accounts belong to. Hartley blacked out the names on the legitimate transactions to stop her from guessing, but he had to leave the account number so she’d know it was a real statement. Still, she had enough that she could have figured it out when the news finally broke that Hartley had disappeared.”

Doctor Morgan uncoiled, leaning forward, waiting. Her eyes saw the story in mine.

“Your husband knew that nobody else was going to report Hartley missing. The Rathaways certainly wouldn’t do it. He was already buying time for the killers to get out of town, so he used that time to track down Nora Allen as well. He figured if he could get the evidence Hartley had given her, then he’d be safe. He knew she had an office at home, so he staked out her house one Saturday. That evening, Doctor Allen went out. Nora stayed in, watched a movie with her son, and then put him to bed. When the lights went out, your husband climbed up the back roof and used a kitchen knife to open the unlocked window.” 

My voice slowed, recounting the theory I’d formed looking at the old photos of the Allen house, playing Henry Fonda and imagining that everything Doctor Allen had said was true.

“I think Nora was waiting up. She heard something, went to investigate, and caught your husband looking for this disk. And then, at the worst possible moment, Henry Allen came home. Nora screamed, and your husband stabbed her.”

A tremor ran through Doctor Morgan from head to toe. Her breath hitched into a gulping sob and she pressed a hand to her chest like I’d put a knife through her heart.

I went on to the end. “Your husband dropped the knife and went back out through the window. I guess Doctor Allen didn’t notice it closing. Nobody did. But the front door was shut and the neighbours could only have heard Nora scream through one of the windows.”

Doctor Morgan’s breathing slowed. She slowly relaxed her hands. The trembling had finally stopped.

“So that’s what happened,” she said.

“Almost,” I said. “The person who broke into the house that night and who stabbed Nora Allen. It wasn’t Harrison Wells. It was you.”


	14. Debts No Honest Man Can Pay

Doctor Tess Morgan’s expression didn’t change at all. There was something like a challenge in her eyes. She’d been waiting seventeen years for someone to solve this equation.

I said, “There was no way Doctor Wells could have known about Nora Allen before he arranged for Hartley’s disappearance. If he had, he would have made sure he got the disk back first. But you knew, because Hartley told you what he’d found out. He got so desperate he even tried talking to his parents, but they wouldn’t see him. His mom said he told her about another woman trying to calm him down. That wasn’t Nora Allen. He was talking about you trying to convince him he must be wrong. Then, when you noticed Hartley was missing, you realised what your husband had done. You knew Nora Allen could put it together, so you tried to get the evidence back from her.”

She still didn’t speak. Her eyes were drifting. She was lost in a dream of how things could have been.

“I heard a lot about how great Doctor Wells was to Barry when he came to STAR Labs. He might have been pretty calculating, but I don’t think he was a cold enough bastard to play mentor to somebody he’d basically orphaned. But you steered clear of Barry. He had no reason to visit your department, and he never came to this house. Not until last weekend, when, just like Hartley, Barry came here with the evidence I think he’d found in Nora Allen’s old files. He’d gotten into the accounts himself and made unedited copies of the statements to prove they came from the same place. He said something that made you realise he suspected your husband in his mom’s death and Hartley’s disappearance. Luckily, Doctor Wells was out of town, so as soon as he was back you went to the labs to warn him.”

Doctor Morgan’s memories were rushing towards the present. Tears were twisting down her face.

“Did you tell him?” I asked. “Did you finally tell your husband what you’d done to protect STAR Labs and his reputation before you shot him?”

She contracted, rolling herself almost into a ball, squeezing her eyes shut. A high whine came out of her throat, all that I could hear of the silent scream of grief into her hands. She couldn’t cry for Hartley Rathaway, or for Nora and the Allen family. But she could cry for Harrison Wells.

I sat there, silent and forgotten as her body and soul shook themselves apart. After a long time, she spoke from the wreckage in the voice of a lost little girl.

“He tried to deny he’d had anything to do with what happened to Hartley. So I told him about Nora Allen. He didn’t believe me. Then he got angry. He said if there was evidence, he’d make Barry give it to him. He… he went for the gun in the drawer. I tried to stop him… and the gun went off.”

“And after you left, Barry found the body. He was afraid his dad had done it. It didn’t matter that Henry Allen had never set foot in STAR Labs, wouldn’t know about the security blind spots, and he probably couldn’t find your offices in that maze even if he wanted to. This gave both Allens a motive, so Barry didn’t tell the cops about it and got them looking at him instead of you.” I let out a sigh at the painful joke. “If a married woman is murdered, they always check the husband first. They forgot it goes both ways.”

“It was an accident,” she said. “I never… he shouldn’t…”

“If it was, then why not come forward?”

“I nearly did,” she said. “So many times. Every time they asked me, I wanted to. But I couldn’t. I kept thinking of Harrison’s reputation and STAR Labs and what would happen to Jesse…”

I took a breath and braced myself for the cruellest thing I’d said so far. “Doctor Morgan… Jesse knows.”

Her breath stalled in her throat, choking her. “No,” she whined.

“Yes,” I said. “Or… at least I think she suspects something. Why do you think she spent half an hour walking to STAR Labs that night to ask for a ride? I think she called you but you didn’t answer because you were already at STAR Labs. I bet if someone checks the phone records they’ll find a couple of calls to the house and to your cell. That’s why she went to see her dad instead. She knows you weren’t here, and that you lied to the police when you said you were.”

“Oh my god,” she said, the fear on her face telling me I’d gotten it right. “Jesse…”

“I guess she would rather it was Barry, because she doesn’t want to think about what it means if it wasn’t.”

“What… what are you going to do?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “But in a couple of minutes, Detective Spivot is going to knock on your door, and you are going to go downtown and confess to shooting your husband. You don’t even have to say what the two of you really argued about. Make up anything you like. Get a good lawyer, plead manslaughter and you’ll probably be out in time to watch Jesse finish grad school.”

The fear retreated. She felt her way back towards familiar ground. A last gasp of calculations whirled through her eyes.

“What happens if I don’t confess?”

I sighed. I really hoped it wouldn’t come to this. I picked up the CD. “If you don’t go with Detective Spivot, then I will give this disk to Iris Allen at _Central City Picture News_. And I swear to you she will burn STAR Labs to the ground to get her husband back.”

Doctor Morgan nodded. She ran a hand through her hair and pushed the tears off her cheeks. “Please call your friend. Can I have a moment… to speak to my daughter?”

“Sure, Doctor Morgan. When you’re ready.”

I sent the text while she went upstairs. Patty appeared at the door a few minutes later. I let her in.

“Did it work?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said. “Thanks for backing me up.”

Patty nodded slowly. “It’s what Joe would have done. Hey… um… you never said why she really did it.”

“It’s probably better you don’t know.”

She was smart enough not to ask. We both listened to the sound of clothing on the move. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then there were footsteps and a conversation trickling down the stairs.

“Jesse, honey,” Doctor Morgan said, “I have to go out and run some errands.”

“Mom, it’s Sunday,” Jesse said.

“I know. But I won’t be long.”

I wondered for a long time afterwards if Jesse heard the lie. We nearly missed her saying, “Okay, mom. Love you.”

“I love you too, Jesse.”

The bedroom door closed and Doctor Morgan came down the stairs. She’d brushed her hair, arranged her makeup and changed her clothes. Norma Desmond, ready for her close-up.

“Good morning, Detective Spivot,” she said, inclining her head in greeting.

“Doctor Morgan,” Patty said. She laid one of her hands on Doctor Morgan’s arm, just above the elbow. “This way please.”

They walked out of the house together. I followed, closing the door behind me. We got as far as the drive before we saw Zolomon strolling down it, an expression of cheerful bemusement on his face like we’d surprised him with a party.

“Patty, what’s going on?”

Doctor Morgan stepped forward, out of Patty’s grip. “Detective Zolomon, I’m sorry you wasted a trip. I’m going to the station to confess. I killed my husband.”

“What?” Zolomon said. He looked over the funeral march and then at me. “Eddie, can I talk to you for a minute?”

I didn’t make eye contact. I followed Zolomon off the drive where he put his back to the audience, blocking the sidewalk like a well-dressed wall. The smile went out of his eyes and his mouth twisted into something nasty.

“Thawne, forget about your license, I’ll have your balls for interfering with a murder case…”

He paused, savouring the buffet of threats he had in front of him. I didn’t give him the chance to enjoy any of them.

“Shut up, Hunter,” I said.

His mouth dropped. He blinked twice, replaying the last few seconds to check what he’d heard.

“What?”

I dragged Nora Allen’s CD from my pocket and nearly rammed it down his throat. “You’ve been using this whole case to work a personal agenda. You never thought Barry Allen shot Wells, certainly not for that stupid motive you gave him. He really threw you by confessing, didn’t he? You wanted more time for your investigation. You wanted a chance to go through Wells’ financials, because when you were a rookie agent on the Darbinyan case, somebody said that Wells took their money and you wanted to prove what the FBI couldn’t. Well, here’s the proof, and it’ll never see a courtroom.”

Like Doctor Morgan, Zolomon was hypnotised by the moving disk, half-heartedly slapping at it like a cat with a piece of string. “He found it? How?”

“No idea,” I lied, because if Zolomon couldn’t draw a line between Barry’s hooded excuse to visit Starling City and the teraflop blonde heading Queen Consolidated’s new cybersecurity division, then I wasn’t going to do it for him. “But he did it without a warrant, and now you’re never going to get one because Harrison Wells died in a tragic domestic dispute that got out of hand. If his wife’s confession isn’t enough then find the outfit she wore and check it for GSR. Close the case and call the papers.”  

Zolomon got his mouth under control. He stared at me, then looked over his shoulder at Patty helping Doctor Morgan into the back of her car. He could probably see Monday’s headlines already. A bit of his media smile came back.

“Sorry there won’t be room on the podium for you, Eddie. Hell, you don’t even get the girl.”

I took his last shot without flinching. “Nice working with you, Detective Zolomon,” I said. “Enjoy the press conference.”

I walked around him, across the road and up to Patty’s car, where she was waiting with her hands clasped in front of her.

“What is it?” I asked.

“She wanted to talk to you.”

Patty stepped away. I bent down. Doctor Morgan was safely buckled in, leaning back on the head rest. Her breath came in long, sad sighs.

“Is that it, Mr Thawne?” she asked.

“That’s it,” I said.

“What about… Nora Allen?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Henry Allen says it doesn’t matter anymore. I guess you’d better hope Barry feels the same.”

I straightened up, closed the door on her and leant against the car. I sighed. “Two out of three on a good day.”

“What’s that?” Patty asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “You should go before Zolomon decides he wants to drive her in.”

“Sure,” Patty said. “So… it really is over?”

“Almost,” I said.

She caught the hint even faster this time. “I don’t want to know, do I?”

“No. You probably don’t.”

* * *

I parked right opposite the Nemean Club so they’d see me coming and sat in the car writing a note on the back of one of my cards. Then I got out and banged on the club’s door hard enough to shake the foundations. I wasn’t even surprised to see Sam open it. He didn’t look surprised to see me either. Just disappointed, like I’d shown up to read a meter on movie night.

“What is it?” he asked.

I folded up the card and handed it over. “Give this to your boss.”

“How do you know there’s anybody here?”

“Because Sunday morning’s the best time to do the books for one of these places. I’ll wait.”

He closed the door. I leant against the wall and thought about taking up smoking, just to give me something to pass the time. I’d give them five minutes and then get a coffee. I only waited four.

Sam led me into the bar. Tony and Jared weren’t around, so he ran the electronic sniffer over me himself. Then he took me behind a curtain and through the private door to see the wizard. I was expecting the back office to be upstairs, but I suppose that would have been too easy to monitor from the outside. I was shown into a room that should have been a broom closet, where the desk was an L-shaped attachment to the wall and the files were kept on three rows of shelves which starting at head height. Just enough space for the bare essentials and not really enough for a visitor. Snart didn’t seem to mind, but after you spend time in prison, all any room needs is a door you can open yourself.

I pulled up a low stool and at down. Snart turned his chair to face me. There was a closed laptop on the desk in front of him. My card rested on the lid. On the back, I’d written _$22,500 for Hartley Rathaway_.

“Nice of you to come by, Eddie,” Snart said.

“I did that job you wanted, Mr Snart,” I said.

“Job?”

“Sure,” I said. “You needed to know whether Harrison Wells’ death had anything to do with his business with the Darbinyans. It didn’t. It was a domestic. His wife shot him.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. Check CCPN tomorrow.”

Snart kept waiting, watching me with his almost-smile. I was playing poker with a glacier. Nothing to do but go all in.

“The reason you care so much about what happened to Wells is that Barry Allen didn’t come here on Wednesday to ask about the Darbinyans. He’d been investigating an old case and found evidence implicating Wells in the disappearance of Hartley Rathaway. He found something else as well. Two payments to somebody called Carl Blaine in late February and again in early March of the year 2000. That’s you, Mr Snart. Your aliases are all on record.”

Snart didn’t say anything, but his eyes were dropping towards absolute zero.

“Here’s what I think happened,” I said. “Rathaway found out that Wells had taken money from the family. Wells wanted to keep him quiet, but he couldn’t report it to the Darbinyans because he figured they’d just have Kyle Nimbus arrange a nasty accident for the kid, and maybe even him too. Your story was in all the newspapers when you got out, so he knew you were independent and figured you needed money you hadn’t stolen. So he hired you to scare Rathaway, make sure he kept his mouth shut. Only something went wrong. The kid died. Wells paid you double and held off reporting Rathaway missing while you skipped town. But eventually you got homesick, started dreaming of Central City and a steady income. Going legit would be a real challenge. But you needed funds, and you’d either spent your ill-gotten gains or couldn’t use them without the CCPD catching you. So you blackmailed Wells for a kick-starter. You got your money, but he was scared enough that he also bought a gun.”

Snart looked down. He slowly inspected his wrists, like he was checking his watch. “No handcuffs,” he said. Then he carefully leaned over to examine the side of my belt. “No badge.”

“No evidence,” I said. “It’s all circumstantial or inadmissible. I didn’t come here to arrest you, Mr Snart.”

“You don’t look stupid enough to try blackmail.”

“You’re reading that offer the wrong way around,” I said. “I’ll pay you twenty-two and a half thousand dollars if you tell me where I can find Hartley Rathaway’s body. I know you still know. Wells wouldn’t have paid if you couldn’t prove you’d produce it.”

“Twenty-two and a half thousand.” Snart tasted the words. “How do you figure?”

“His parents are still offering a fifty thousand dollar reward. I’ll arrange for somebody I can trust to find the body. He gets half, you get the other half. Minus my fee. Six days work, plus expenses.”

I didn’t need to tell Snart the alternative. He didn’t need to tell me what would happen if I didn’t keep up my end.

He made me wait a minute, then he smiled and said, “Sold.”

He took an envelope and wrote down two strings of numbers. GPS co-ordinates. I read them back to him. He nodded.

“One more thing,” I said.

“Dangerous words,” he said.

“What really happened the night you took Rathaway?”

Snart settled back in his chair. He lost his smile. Robbing banks is a long way from murdering a defenceless kid. Maybe it was professional pride. Maybe enough conscience was left to prick him about it. Maybe he knew how heavy the truth gets when you have to carry it alone.

“Wells didn’t say that Rathaway was deaf. We grabbed him, put him in a van and drove him out to the Badlands. Must have knocked out his hearing aid in the struggle. He freaked when we came to talk to him. Strong little bastard. Got past us. Ran away into the dark. We went after him, yelled not to be so stupid. We heard him scream. Found him at the bottom of a cliff. His neck was broken, so we buried the body.” He tapped the numbers. “There.”

I put the envelope in my pocket. “Thank you, Mr Snart,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Nice doing business with you, Eddie.”

He didn’t get up or try to shake my hand. He turned back to his desk and opened the laptop. I went through the door, past Sam, out of the club and up the steps. Then I started walking down Granville Street, looking for a coffee whose empty mug could listen to my sins.

* * *

Three days later, a retired CCPD detective called Fred Chyre was walking his retired CCPD dog through the Badlands when the animal broke away and started clawing at the ground. Chyre thought it was after a hare until it came up with its prize. Chyre was old, but a long way from senile. He remembered what a clavicle looked like.

The Badlands are state police territory. They had a team down there in a couple of hours to cautiously excavate the skeleton. It was human, male, and almost intact. The troopers been followed by a light shower of journalists, but Chyre hadn’t lost his cop’s mistrust of reporters. He refused to tell his story to anybody but the daughter of Joe West, his old partner.

Within 24 hours, cool curiosity had gone thermonuclear when dental records identified the body as Central City’s prodigal son. Hartley Rathaway finally came home.

He looked up at me from the photograph beneath the CCPN headline. A baby face, slow smile and parted hair hanging down towards the smooth frames of his glasses. He and Barry Allen could have been brothers. I returned my attention to the story underneath the image. There was nothing new there, except the name appearing on the front page by-line for the first time. Iris West-Allen.

“Barry thinks we should frame it,” she said.

She was sitting on the corner of my desk, her legs hiked up and crossed over like she used to when she’d visit me at the station and watch me pretend to work. She’d gotten her summer smile back. There were no shadows hiding in her eyes.

“Maybe the next one,” I said. “Something a little less morbid.”

“Yeah.”

“How is Barry?”

“He’s okay,” she said. “Captain Singh managed to keep everything quiet, but he’s not happy. So for the next couple of months, Barry is on unofficial probation, reporting to Julian. Makes you wonder which of them is really getting punished.”

“Yeah,” I said. I got up, punched the date I got my detective badge into the safe and brought out the file on Nora Allen. “You should give this back to him.”

“Thanks,” Iris said. “We talked about this. A lot. And with his dad. He doesn’t want to punish Doctor Morgan. He knows what really happened, and that’s enough. So… tomorrow the file is going on a bonfire. The Allen case is closed.”

“About time,” I said. “And there’s something else I need to give you.” I dropped her cheque for $800 on top of the file.

“But… you earned this. I was going to give you the rest today.”

“It’s okay. I got paid.”

Her eyes narrowed. The reporter flared up. “How?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Everybody’s got secrets.”

“I guess if they didn’t, you wouldn’t have a business,” she said. Her eyes were distant, looking over all the things she’d never tell anybody else, not even her husband. Then her mouth twitched up again. “That reminds me. Sara Lance said she might call you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

I wondered if there was anything more awkward than your ex-girlfriend trying to set you up with her potentially lethal attorney.

“Not like that,” Iris said. “She said she might need you to play Paul Drake again. Like the next time her office tries to use her as the canary down a mineshaft.”

“Right.”

“Hey, if you wanted easy, you should have retrained as a chef.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“I always am.”

The conversation was dissolving into babble. One of us had to put it out of its misery.

“I should probably go,” Iris said. “I’ve got so many calls to make for the follow-up.”

“I can’t wait to read it.”

She smiled. It was bright, but a little sad. Then again, so was mine. She wrapped her arms around my neck, rested her chin on my shoulder and brushed her lips across my cheek.

“You’re my hero, Eddie Thawne. Don’t you forget it.”

It was easier than I thought to relax my arms and let her slip out of them.

“Goodbye, Iris,” I said.

She smiled again, she waved, and she ended it the way it was always going to end. Ilsa got on the plane. Bobby Jean left town. Iris walked out of my office.

I crossed the room and closed the door behind her.

_The End_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank everyone who read, liked and commented on this story for coming down these mean streets with me and Eddie. I hope you all enjoyed the ride and your interest and support means a great deal to me. 
> 
> I became aware as I was posting this fanfic that I was inadvertently introducing a lot of people to a genre they might not have really encountered before. That was never my intention; all I wanted to do with this story was have fun in a style of plotting and description that I adore. If I have created some curiosity in my readers for more of this sort of story then all I can do is credit the writers who inspired me: Raymond Chandler, Philip Kerr, and Robert Galbraith. And of course, no acknowledgement would be complete without a credit to Mr Bruce Springsteen for everything his music has taught this Englishman about hopes, fears, and the things we find in the darkness on the edge of town.


End file.
